Jessica and Michael using Skype
Background
In August 2006, David attended Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. For a social event one evening, everyone was bused to Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, where as a souvenir from the employee Apple Store there, he bought his first "webcam" (an Apple Firewire iSight). But there wasn't a great deal one could do with it at that point!
Skype made its name from being an Internet phone (VOIP=Voice Over Internet Protocol) application where two computer users could talk for free (by plugging in a USB phone handset to their computer), anywhere in the world.
In October 2006, Skype with video was released for the Mac (source: Wikipedia). (Before that Skype was an audio-only application.)
Meanwhile, starting in the 1980s when he went off to graduate school, David had had long Sunday night phone calls with his parents every week. This continued with Sheryl, and then extended to Noah and Rafael, too.
So, moving to video seemed like a natural progression.
Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 (circa 2008)
For Jessica's birthday in January 2008, David and Sheryl gave her a webcam for their Mac. (As noted above, this was just over a year after Skype (video) had become available for Mac OS X.) [This was about three years before FaceTime was released (February 2011), although Apple's iChat had existed before then. However in that earlier era few people owned webcam cameras!]
The classic Skype ringtone
The weekly Skype chats were generally catching up on each other's weeks, plus some computer tutorial sessions with David. None of these were recorded, so one does not have the record as one would with letters. But the immediacy of video chatting on a large 24" or 27" screen was remarkable, and really helped shrink the distance from St. Louis to Maryland. Furthermore, it meant that Noah and Rafael had a real and multi-faceted relationship with their out-of-town grandparents, far more than would have been possible otherwise with just a few visits per year back and forth.
Dec. 30, 2008: Noah interviews Grandpa Michael
90 sec snippet of 23 minute session
A very small handful of these Skype sessions were recorded, either with the Call Recorder Skype add-on or externally on an iPhone. These included class assignment "interviews" with grandparents (as early as December 2008, when Noah was 10) or Rafael practicing his Bar Mitzvah davenning in September 2015 with Jessica about 7 weeks before his ceremony.
Skype Seders
2017 Skype Seder with Jessica and Michael
Family details (click to expand)
Clockwise from left: Rachel, Neil, Jonathan, Noah, Jessica and Michael in St. Louis on Skype, Rafael, Sheryl"Skype Seders" were a special category unto themselves, as medical issues made travel more difficult, and then especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. We arranged for Jessica and Michael to have a copy of the same Haggadah we were using, and then each family set up a laptop at the end of the table. (During the pandemic, it was a three-way Skype, with Rachel, Neil, and Jonathan at their home in Silver Spring, Jessica at home in St. Louis, and David, Sheryl, and Rafael in Kensington (MD).) "Reading around the table" as one usually does, was uninterrupted by the computer's "turn," as those people would get to read, too! A video of Jessica reading at the 2020 Seder is shown below.
April 2020 (COVID-19) Skype Seder: Jessica reading;
Tickners in Silver Spring.
The Friedlander Skype chats continued for almost 17 years (Jan. 2008 into early 2025).
In late 2024 or early 2025, Microsoft (which had acquired Skype about ten years prior) announced that it would be discontinuing it in May 2025, with the expectation that people would migrate over to Microsoft Teams. (There were many more choices by 2020, let alone 2025, and so FaceTime or Zoom or Google Meet were all viable alternatives by this time.)
I find it poignant that Jessica's use of Skype pretty much encapsulated nearly the entire history of Skype as a video application on the Mac, and that its life ended quite shortly after hers.
One of Jessica's last happy memories was a four-way video chat in mid-February 2025. (She went back to the hospital the final time about 3 days later.) With David visiting her in St. Louis, Sheryl in Maryland, Noah in Chicago and Rafael in Philadelphia, we chatted about Noah's engagement to Mary Nora a week prior, Rafael's architecture projects at Temple University and more. Jessica was engaged and interested, and the video chat lasted 90 minutes or so.