Comments by "Keit Hammleter" (@keithammleter3824) on "Vladimir Komarov: The Cosmonaut Who Knew He Was Going to Die - Forgotten History" video.
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 @FORGOTTENHISTORYCHANNEL ; Because in 1967, the only organisation that had a videophone service was the Bell System in the USA, and that was just a trial system involving a handful of users within Bell Laboratories and a few big business Bell customers. The Bell Picturephone as it was known was way way too expensive to implement to be anything other than an engineer's toy, and users found it offered no real advantage over the standard voice-only phone as it did not give eye-to-eye contact. That was due to its low image resolution and camera-screen offset.
Not until the advent of high performance personal computers and the development of Skype and its competitors about 15 years ago could video calls become a practical reality.
In 1967, the USA had advanced semiconductor manufacturing capability, and could make almost all spacecraft electronics energy efficient solid state. The USSR was in 1967 so far behind in solid state technology they were forced to use vacuum tube technology for almost all spacecraft electronics, and certainly for any video. Vacuum technology is extremely power hungry.
Why would they include videophone hardware in a spacecraft back then, anyway? Unless you think their project managers planned to kill cosmonauts and Kosygin would want to make a call.
To ask such a question, you must be like my young teenage granddaughter, who on being told that I never had a mobile phone when I was 13, simply did not believe me.
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