> ... and had a real time video chat with her

I'm not sure that's a particularly inspiring example of technology progress.

In 1999 video conferencing over the Internet was already a reality, though it was very low quality. I know we tried it in work around that time. Skype launched in 2003 and basically solved that problem.

So in the next 11 years the main development was in wireless networking, which was basically a refinement of military datalinks which had been in service at least since the AN/ARR-39 of 1956.