When I was a kid growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I heard a lot about how things would be in the distant future.

Of course we would have flying cars and disposable clothes, and we would be vacationing -- if not on the moon -- at least on space-station hotels.

None of those things ever happened, but there were things we got that they never predicted -- home computers, fax machines, cellular telephones, the Internet. And one thing that seems to be coming along now that <em>was</em> predicted is being able to make telephone calls with video attached.

I know the capability for that has been around for some time. I know businesses use video conferencing to save on the time and expense of travel. But for ordinary folks, the coming of things like<a title="Skype" href="http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/home" target="_self"> Skype</a> have made a tremendous amount of difference in both the cost and the quality of long distance calls.

We discovered Skype a couple of years ago when our daughter Pauline was stationed in Beijing. Actually, she told us about it. Skype is one of those sites that uses VOIP (voice over Internet protocols) to enable people to make calls that used to cost dollars per minute for pennies. Pauline would call us from China and we would talk for half an hour to 45 minutes for a total cost of less than a dollar.

By contrast, when my first wife was in Beijing on temporary duty in late 1978, we shared one 10-minute phone call during the three months she was there. It cost $100.

<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Miscellaneous-001.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-604" title="Miscellaneous 001" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Miscellaneous-001-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" /></a>Now Pauline is stationed in Surabaya, Indonesia, more than 10,000 miles and 14 time zones away from our home in Southern California. We talk once a week, and just like before, it costs less than a dollar each time we talk.

The video isn't always terrific, and there is occasionally a lag of a second or so in the sound.

But our daughter is halfway around the world from us, and we get to look at her face -- and the face of our little granddaughter -- every single week.

You have to have grown up in a different time, a time when "long-distance telephone calls" were a big deal, when you hurried through what you had to say and didn't waste time just chatting because you didn't want a nasty surprise when your monthly phone bill came.

Actually, it never made sense that long distance cost more, especially once people were able to dial the numbers direct. And now, on both my home phone and my cellular phone, domestic long distance calls are included in my monthly minutes at no extra chanrge.

That's all well and good, but it isn't Skype.

It isn't looking at my beautiful daughter and my lovely granddaughter and seeing just how well they're doing and how happy they're feeling.

That's truly a wonderful part of my distant future.