Video calls have been with us for a while. Except, they were rarely used. IME, people sometimes had Skype calls with relatives abroad and that's about it. And then, COVID happened. Suddenly, Zoom skyrocketed, with Google Meet not far behind. The reason is obvious.
Now, the time of lockdowns and restrictions on gatherings is over, the incentives to do video calls are (AFAICT) more or less the same as pre-COVID, and yet video calls persist. They became a completely routine way of doing business meetings, academic seminars and occasional social events. Why? AFAICT it's just the initial adoption barrier: once everyone did lots of video calls, and realized they are actually pretty convenient, they just kept using them.
So, here's a fun question: What other things are like video calls in the pre-COVID era? That is, the technology exists (more or less: maybe the UX needs some trivial improvements), the use-cases exist, only nobody uses it just because they're unaware or because it's not a "normal" thing everyone does. Given something to create initial adoption (like COVID did for video calls), everyone would start using it and never go back.
When I was a kid (in the 90s) I recall video calls being mentioned alongside flying cars as a failed idea: something which had been technically feasible for a long time, with many product-launch attempts, but no success. Then Skype was launched in 2003, and became (by my own reckoning) a commonly-known company by 2008. My personal perception was that video calls were a known viable option since that time, which were used by people around me when appropriate, and the pandemic did nothing but increase their appropriateness. But of course, other experiences may differ.
So I just wanted to highlight that one technology might have several different """takeoff""" points, and that we could set different threshholds for statements like "video calls have been with us for a while, except they were rarely used" -- EG, the interpretation of that statement which refers to pre-1990s, vs the interpretation that refers to pre-2020s.