Image Cache: In the photo above we see a videophone (or picturephone as they were sometimes called at midcentury) being demonstrated at the International Radio Exhibition in Stuttgart, West Germany in 1965. The weird part? The woman in the photo is apparently not even bothering to look at the person she’s speaking with.
Associated Press
Browse through the cool photos, animations and diagrams in Gizmodo’s Image Cache here.
But we get it. Are you ever on a Skype call and look directly into the camera just to freak the other person out? We do too.
Once the technology was conquered, tech companies couldn’t quite figure out how to popularise the videophone. Instead, it snuck in through the back door in devices like our smartphones and computers. But how often do you use Skype or videochat in general? That’s what we thought.