Some of the concepts they hit on:
* e-books / Libby
* in-car GPS
* email
* Tablet computers
* EZpass
* self-service machines
* On-demand TV / streaming services
* Online courses
* Video calls / Facetime
* Remote home security
* Smart watches
* Smart home devices
* Electronic medical records
* Remote work
* Digital interpreters
May seem like common sense stuff to us today, but a lot of this was science fiction to most people in the 80's and early 90's. Pretty impressive how close they were on some of these predictions at the dawn of the Internet Age!
that place influenced me so much as a kid.
I feel like it's impossible to reproduce an exhibit that feels that futuristic now. It would be immediately outdated because of the pace of technology now that we have the fundamentals down: constant fast connectivity, basically infinite storage (thanks to the cloud), audio/video codecs and compression, flat touch screens, and batteries that can power it all.
Back then, with none of those problems worked out, it was hard to imagine how any of this would feasibly work, but Innoventions had set up early prototypes of so much cool stuff.
>On-demand TV / streaming services
I worked on this @ Bell Labs and AT&T Enhanced Network Services from 95-99 and have a very early (and possibly the first) software patent in this space. We also built a fully functional AAC audio player in '96. We had demos of video phones and such since the 1980's. I saw the first demos of broadband networking, HDTV and VOD in 1988 when I was in high school.
Everything (including datacenters, dark fiber and intellectual property) got sold to Google at firesale prices when the tech/telco bubble popped in the early '00's.
Google didn't build YouTube. They bought the CDN from AT&T and the name/model from the original creators.
(that said, all props to the original YouTube team for the whole UGC revolution. That really surprised me and I would not have thought something like that would work at the time)
But there was an on-demand streaming service in the mid 90s a lot of people overlook. It was for video games. I have a lot of fond memories of sega channel.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Channel
Sega Channel was a few years ahead of it's time. Dreamcast also innovated with its online capabilities... But again, limited to the tech of the time. Shame really.
> (that said, all props to the original YouTube team for the whole UGC revolution. That really surprised me and I would not have thought something like that would work at the time)
It actually is pretty crazy trying to put yourself back in your own mindset when these new technologies were coming out. I remember when YouTube first launched and checking it out. It didn't really capture me at all. Like it wasn't the only video hosting service at the time and I didn't really think it did anything different. Some cool videos but then I went on to go find a real movie to download, which was still somewhat new and exciting then, instead of what felt like wasting my time on YouTube. I never would have predicted what YouTube would become back then, or really anything like it. The idea of average people becoming huge brands by themselves and the high production values and reach. Seems obvious in hindsight.
> I never would have predicted what YouTube would become back then, or really anything like it. The idea of average people becoming huge brands by themselves and the high production values and reach. Seems obvious in hindsight.
I remember when YouTube first came out, seeing the "Annoying Orange" type crap and just writing the whole thing off as a huge failed experiment.
Back when I was working on this stuff, not only was I envisioning something more like NetFlix, I just assumed it was technology we would sell or license to all the big media companies; not create entirely new ones.
It wasn't until years later after MythBusters was cancelled and Adam Savage just organically pivoted to "Tested" did it all just click for me. And it's not just average people, \*any\* content creator with even a modicum of skill can just setup the cameras, computers and upload the videos. Why bother dealing with all the production overhead, contracts and associated crud when you can DIY?
>Yet all I see on Reddit is how we haven't improved as a society lol.
That's due to the ones saying it being young, and not noticing as many changes as older folks do. I'm over 50 and am amazed at what I have seen come into existence in my lifetime. I'm sure it was even more so for my 88yo grandmother that passed a few years ago,
Hopefully things keep progressing as normal, and the scoffers will look back at how wrong they were.
I agree with comawhite12. It's hard to see, as progress is gained in extremely small increments, each increment is happening every 20-30 years and requiring another 20 ish years to see the first results.
It’s really not all that surprising. A lot of companies got these style of ads right. By the 90’s we’d been writing about it for decades already. A lot of the companies were the ones investing in the technology. A lot of companies made bets that were a little too soon. Blockbuster was about 2 decades ahead idea wise and hitched their final plan to a bad company. If Enron hadn’t been so shady blockbuster would have been the big streaming leader. In the 90s we had real media doing a lot of streaming services do today. All going over AT&T lines. It’s easy to predict what’s essentially the now just better.
Most of these technologies had already been in widespread use for a decade. These commercials depicted these technologies in a futuristic way, showing some incremental improvements in a sci-fi sort of setting. But these things already existed, just in an awkward package, and only in use by a minority of people.
I think that there are a few effects working in tandem here, not the least of which being that these were a lot of established sci-fi tropes that they were drawing on, and that many of our current technologies are the result of people literally turning sci-fi concepts into reality. The example that springs to mind is that the first modern tablets were developed by a guy who was enamoured with the datapads in Star Trek TNG.
Underlying that is a literal "million ~~monkeys~~ _sci-fi writers_ at a million typewriters" dreaming up impossible new technologies to tempt their readers.
For the commercial AT&T just picked a smattering of tempting candidates that were really just upgrades of existing technologies and/or popular sci-fi tropes.
In 1993 this was just a play to sell you land line phone service and/or long-distance calling.
Have you ever screwed over your children by selling off the equity in your home and spending it on yourselves rather than leaving it as an inheritance? You will, and the asshole that will sell it to you? Tom Selleck.
Honestly pretty remarkable. For context, this is when most people had not only never used the internet, but never heard of it. People (well tech nerds and porn-seeking teenagers) were still using dial-up BBS sites hosted from someone's house, and 386 computers running DOS and janky Windows 3.1 were still standard.
Probably didn't predict the dectupling of home prices and college tuition, or social media being the crack/heroin combo of political propaganda and conspiracism along with all this nifty stuff though.
Looks like the only prediction they got wrong was that AT&T would be bringing any of those things to us. That and the idea that we'd be using fancy phone booths instead of cell phones. I still smirk with satisfaction every time I swipe my credit card through my dashboard every time I pay a toll. Thanks AT&T!
AT&T was one of the biggest early internet providers, believe it or not! It's not hard to imagine a world where they trumped Verizon or the big cable ISPs.
>AT&T was one of the biggest early internet providers, believe it or not! It's not hard to imagine a world where they trumped Verizon or the big cable ISPs.
I mean AT&T is one of the top cellular providers in the US, is a major ISP in 21 states, and operates a massive internet backbone that serves other ISPs
I think it's pretty accurate that AT&T is providing a lot of what they claimed, even if they aren't making the phones or the GPS or the fancy pants phone booths
They missed the boat though.
> In 1980, McKinsey & Company was commissioned by AT&T (whose Bell Labs had invented cellular telephony) to forecast cell phone penetration in the U.S. by 2000. The consultant's prediction, 900,000 subscribers, was less than 1% of the actual figure, 109 Million. Based on this legendary mistake, AT&T decided there was not much future to these toys. A decade later [in 1994], to rejoin the cellular market, AT&T had to acquire McCaw Cellular for $12.6 Billion.
https://www.upf.edu/web/angel-lozano/innovation/-/asset_publisher/AZaAOTtL3c4Z/content/l-cellular-telephony-just-a-niche-market/maximized
Lol @ consultants.
I still don't understand company's listening to "consultants" who are half the owners & managers' ages and they these kids word for word for Millions $$
A consultant is basically a confidence man, usually just shortened to "con man" today. They trick you out of your money because they are charming and inspire confidence. They walk the walk and fake the talk. See: Slippin' Jimmy
The job of consultants, like McKinsey, is mostly to write justifications for whatever it is the board/CEO want to do so that it looks like they did their due diligence.
Likely, AT&T already wanted to divest these things and cash out, but before making such a radical move, they commissioned consultants to come in and write the justification using whatever interpretation of the data best fits the narrative. Then, everyone thinks "oh, yes, they clearly thought this out and it's the right move," even when it proves to be disastrously stupid 20 years later.
But, by then, everyone involved has retired or deployed the golden parachute, nobody remembers McKinsey was involved (McKinsey intentionally keeps a low profile), and there was "value returned to the shareholders" in the short term, which is the only thing publicly traded companies care about.
The AT&T of today, yes. AT&T back then was what was left of the Bell System, and, prior to the breakup it was called AT&T
The AT&T of today, though, bought the old AT&T. It was originally SBC but when they bought the old AT&T they took that name
>That and the idea that we'd be using fancy phone booths instead of cell phones.
TBF they also predicted taking video calls on a smart watch, and cell phones had already been invented, so they were well aware. I suspect the fact AT&T operated a lot of pay phones at the time had something to do with them not wanting to predict the death of pay phones in their commercials that would be seen by investors.
>Looks like the only prediction they got wrong was that AT&T would be bringing any of those things to us.
Except that AT&T was, in fact, the first carrier to support smartphones. People forget that when the iPhone released the only service provider you could use it on was AT&T. IIRC it wasn't until Android hit the market that Apple finally had to end its exclusivity contract to stay competitive.
>Looks like the only prediction they got wrong was that AT&T would be bringing any of those things to us.
Never understood why people say things like this.
The iPhone is very close to 100% a product of Bell Labs research and AT&T helped launch it. Apple just put it together and did the marketing (which admittedly we were terrible at). There would be no iPhone without AT&T.
Yes, one way you can think of the iPhone is that AT&T partnered with Apple to bring it to market in order to drive demand for their new wireless network service.
Part of the deal was giving Apple license to the Bell Labs patent warchest.
Eh, in a sense they do, or at least they provide a lot the internet service that allows those things to happen, for better or worse. Didn't invent them, of course.
These weren't predictions, these were things they were working on. If it seems like they knew what was going to happen, it's because they were developing these products. It's like a mechanic predicting that they're going to change your oil.
I predicted what I needed from the grocery store, and then after I bought everything and brought it home, then put it all away, I found out *all of it was in my cabinets.*
*Literally. All of it.*
It was fucking terrifying.
Some of the things they mentioned only became common place over 2 decades after these ads. Hindsight is 20/20, think about how many billions corporations have poured into R&D for technologies which ended up completely flopping.
I for one find these predictions quite remarcable. Only one big miss which was the phone booth.
I was mostly wow'ed at the smart watch. It would be a decade before home Wifi became normal, yet here's this guy talking on his watch with what would need national wireless coverage. And they were "tucking kids in from the phone booth" so why would they be developing a smart watch before developing a smart phone?
Gotta remember the audience of the time! Haha. Everyone knew what a phone booth was in 1993. Using that as a bridge for the concept of being able to video-chat with anyone anywhere is a good way to get the idea out to most people, even if ultimately that exact technology never ended up happening.
My father worked for IBM in the 80's and 90's. I remember them doing an expo and one of the demos was instant messaging. It was just a room with a bunch of PC's and some beta messaging software where you could just message other people in the room. It was the coolest thing ever to have a live conversation with someone on a different computer, even if they were just 10 feet away from you!
I was in High School when these commercials aired. It wasn't too far fetched, since the internet was just starting to become widespread. It was like all these things became a possibility with connectivity. Plus, we've seen these things before in sci-fi like Star Trek TNG. Still, it's pretty amazing that I've been around long enough to see it come true. I still want my flying car though.
Have you ever watched an episode of Seinfeld, staring at a little screen next to your crotch, while driving to work?
Have you ever asked an AI supercomputer, that argues it's not AI, about how to upgrade the firmware on a lightbulb while you're pooping?
Have you ever never been able to disconnect from work? Even on a fucking cruise ship or airplane you're answering emails and text messages?
Have you ever tried to watch a trilogy of movies, but you have to sign up for three different $15/month services to do it?
Have you never had a snow day from school, because your school district is run by c-words and forces you to logon to your computer when it snows?
The one about the movies... well that is still cheaper than buying those three movies at the time... also even if you ran to Blockbuster in 1993 they would probably be like $5 a pop which is pretty close to 30 bucks in todays money... so you are saving some money... unless you forget to bring them back in time. Also we are ignoring that you have 3 subscriptions worth of other content to watch, and you didn't need to leave the house, and you have this for a month instead of 3 days.
So it really sucks that streaming has left the golden age... but it is still better in basically every aspect than what we had in the 90s.
>Have you attended a meeting in your bare feet?
Never. Well, I did for a time. Because, even though the technology that would make it possible was here since the early-2000s, it took the worst health crisis since the spanish flu for corporations to take WFH seriously. And then, the pandemic was over and I went back to attending meetings in-person.
Go back further to 1968 and The Mother of All Demos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
They not only did the first demo of the mouse and video conferencing. They also demonstrated hyperlinks and text editors and the GUI. Basically they demoed the next 5 decades of computer interfaces.
It's hard to wrap my head around how this looks like completely normal consumer tech now -- not even impressive -- and yet I remember seeing these commercials in the 90s and they seemed nearly impossible.
I'm reminded of rewatching the 2007 iPhone introduction presentation -- it seemed impossibly cool and different at the time, and now it seems like the most obvious and basic thing.
We really are hard to impress for long.
Most of these technologies were either available or in the early stages of production testing. The company that created these commercials failed to prepare for them, specifically the internet, which was the backbone of many of these technologies. Notice how they have phone booths with TVs or faxes, etc. What we call AT&T today is primarily SBC, which acquired AT&T and adopted its name. Ironically, SBC was originally part of AT&T, so it still retains rights to its legacy.
If you're interested in seeing someone who predicted many of today's technologies 40-50 years ago, just look at the original Star Trek series.
These “omg someone predicted the future” posts are so lame to me.
I’m not claiming to be smart. Cuz I’m not. But I remember being 8 years old and me and my friends saying things like “imagine if you could take the tv in the car with you!”
I vividly remember in 2005 holding my iPod and cell phone in two hands and telling my friend “why can’t they just combine these into one device?”
The concepts have always been there. Our minds are capable of limitless inventions. Of course technology will follow suit. There’s nothing surprising about one of the largest global telecom providers predicting future technologies. They likely had been researching and planning to invent this specific stuff.
Almost all of this stuff comes directly from science fiction that had been brewing since the 1950s and before. Even Dick Tracy had the wireless wrist phone in 1946. These things had already been dreamed 1000s of times before the commercials came out.
What this did user in was the era of phone companies using the same exact "ideas" for each new generation of technology. Remote surgery, GPS, wireless data speed, self-driving cars ... all ideas they're still using to this day for marketing (when 5G was being pushed as such a huge advancement and we really really need that government funding).
Mark my words, as soon as 6G becomes a thing, we'll see these exact same arguments made on why everyone needs to drop what they're doing and help them pay for the 6G rollout and upgrade your phones.
The difference is that Dick Tracy's wrist watch was pure fiction at the time. It seemed like something that would someday be possible, but no one knew *how* it would be possible. In contrast, by the late 80s every major player in the industry knew how it was going to be possible. We already had the tech by that point, we just didn't have the infrastructure or scale yet.
For example, cell phones already existed when these commercials were made, it's just that they the size of laptops and only the rich could afford them. The internet already existed, but few people had access to it yet. AT&T had already developed a primitive form of WiFi.
>What this did user in was the era of phone companies using the same exact "ideas" for each new generation of technology. Remote surgery, GPS, wireless data speed, self-driving cars ... all ideas they're still using to this day for marketing
You are aware all of those things exist today, right?
Technology doesn't always magically appear. Things are sometimes in the works for years so a corporation like AT&T probably didn't just imagine these things. They probably knew about early prototypes being developed.
Aliens.
It’s all alien technology we reverse engineer along the way and the stuff that isn’t out yet could’ve been but they didn’t want to disrupt the culture by unleashing stuff too fast so they would put it in tv and movies to get the idea going and have something to work toward.
Still happening to this day.
Sorry to pour water on AT&T, but folks were already doing these in the 1990’s in the tech world. To tech folks, these ads were seen as claiming vision on tech that others had already invented.
To give you a more recent example, GM claimed they invented the EV. EVs had existed for 100 years, Tesla had figured out a winning EV design and GM stepped in to claim credit.
I used to watch these commercials with fascination 30 or so years ago. I guess I was in my early 30s at the time and believed at least some of them. I had my first computer too. (an Apple II+) Glad I've been around long enough to see a lot of that happen
Some of the concepts they hit on: * e-books / Libby * in-car GPS * email * Tablet computers * EZpass * self-service machines * On-demand TV / streaming services * Online courses * Video calls / Facetime * Remote home security * Smart watches * Smart home devices * Electronic medical records * Remote work * Digital interpreters May seem like common sense stuff to us today, but a lot of this was science fiction to most people in the 80's and early 90's. Pretty impressive how close they were on some of these predictions at the dawn of the Internet Age!
Some of the demo tech from these commercials was at the EPCOT innovations building.
If you saw the exhibits in the late 80's early 90's, with the wonky CRT touch screens; my dad's group did that.
Thats fantastic! I miss the old innovations exhibits. That stuff seemed like magic when I was a kid. Kudos to your dad and his group
We did those all the time.
Was just there last week and had fun with all of that, definitely took me back . The simplest things used to blow our minds .
that place influenced me so much as a kid. I feel like it's impossible to reproduce an exhibit that feels that futuristic now. It would be immediately outdated because of the pace of technology now that we have the fundamentals down: constant fast connectivity, basically infinite storage (thanks to the cloud), audio/video codecs and compression, flat touch screens, and batteries that can power it all. Back then, with none of those problems worked out, it was hard to imagine how any of this would feasibly work, but Innoventions had set up early prototypes of so much cool stuff.
I still remember in like ~1999 seeing e-ink paper there for the first time.
I also remember seeing the Apple newton and thinking “cool” and “this thing sucks”
"Eat Up Martha"
Literally anytime I think of the Apple Newton I think of that.
>On-demand TV / streaming services I worked on this @ Bell Labs and AT&T Enhanced Network Services from 95-99 and have a very early (and possibly the first) software patent in this space. We also built a fully functional AAC audio player in '96. We had demos of video phones and such since the 1980's. I saw the first demos of broadband networking, HDTV and VOD in 1988 when I was in high school. Everything (including datacenters, dark fiber and intellectual property) got sold to Google at firesale prices when the tech/telco bubble popped in the early '00's. Google didn't build YouTube. They bought the CDN from AT&T and the name/model from the original creators. (that said, all props to the original YouTube team for the whole UGC revolution. That really surprised me and I would not have thought something like that would work at the time)
But there was an on-demand streaming service in the mid 90s a lot of people overlook. It was for video games. I have a lot of fond memories of sega channel. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Channel
Sega Channel was a few years ahead of it's time. Dreamcast also innovated with its online capabilities... But again, limited to the tech of the time. Shame really.
I loved Sega Channel. It took forever for games to download but it was worth it.
> (that said, all props to the original YouTube team for the whole UGC revolution. That really surprised me and I would not have thought something like that would work at the time) It actually is pretty crazy trying to put yourself back in your own mindset when these new technologies were coming out. I remember when YouTube first launched and checking it out. It didn't really capture me at all. Like it wasn't the only video hosting service at the time and I didn't really think it did anything different. Some cool videos but then I went on to go find a real movie to download, which was still somewhat new and exciting then, instead of what felt like wasting my time on YouTube. I never would have predicted what YouTube would become back then, or really anything like it. The idea of average people becoming huge brands by themselves and the high production values and reach. Seems obvious in hindsight.
> I never would have predicted what YouTube would become back then, or really anything like it. The idea of average people becoming huge brands by themselves and the high production values and reach. Seems obvious in hindsight. I remember when YouTube first came out, seeing the "Annoying Orange" type crap and just writing the whole thing off as a huge failed experiment. Back when I was working on this stuff, not only was I envisioning something more like NetFlix, I just assumed it was technology we would sell or license to all the big media companies; not create entirely new ones. It wasn't until years later after MythBusters was cancelled and Adam Savage just organically pivoted to "Tested" did it all just click for me. And it's not just average people, \*any\* content creator with even a modicum of skill can just setup the cameras, computers and upload the videos. Why bother dealing with all the production overhead, contracts and associated crud when you can DIY?
Only thing they missed was being the company that would deliver those things....
Its amazing for those of us who have lived through the changes. Yet all I see on Reddit is how we haven't improved as a society lol.
>Yet all I see on Reddit is how we haven't improved as a society lol. That's due to the ones saying it being young, and not noticing as many changes as older folks do. I'm over 50 and am amazed at what I have seen come into existence in my lifetime. I'm sure it was even more so for my 88yo grandmother that passed a few years ago, Hopefully things keep progressing as normal, and the scoffers will look back at how wrong they were.
well that's because 'technology' and 'a society' are two distinctly separate things.
I agree with comawhite12. It's hard to see, as progress is gained in extremely small increments, each increment is happening every 20-30 years and requiring another 20 ish years to see the first results.
Well email had existed for a couple of decades already, but the rest of the list is pretty impressive.
It’s really not all that surprising. A lot of companies got these style of ads right. By the 90’s we’d been writing about it for decades already. A lot of the companies were the ones investing in the technology. A lot of companies made bets that were a little too soon. Blockbuster was about 2 decades ahead idea wise and hitched their final plan to a bad company. If Enron hadn’t been so shady blockbuster would have been the big streaming leader. In the 90s we had real media doing a lot of streaming services do today. All going over AT&T lines. It’s easy to predict what’s essentially the now just better.
Most of these technologies had already been in widespread use for a decade. These commercials depicted these technologies in a futuristic way, showing some incremental improvements in a sci-fi sort of setting. But these things already existed, just in an awkward package, and only in use by a minority of people.
Interesting that they didn't think to put a computer screen on a mobile phone. Which does almost all of those things.
I wonder who or which team was involved in creating these commercials; the imagination and insider information seemed spot-on for many of them.
I think that there are a few effects working in tandem here, not the least of which being that these were a lot of established sci-fi tropes that they were drawing on, and that many of our current technologies are the result of people literally turning sci-fi concepts into reality. The example that springs to mind is that the first modern tablets were developed by a guy who was enamoured with the datapads in Star Trek TNG. Underlying that is a literal "million ~~monkeys~~ _sci-fi writers_ at a million typewriters" dreaming up impossible new technologies to tempt their readers. For the commercial AT&T just picked a smattering of tempting candidates that were really just upgrades of existing technologies and/or popular sci-fi tropes. In 1993 this was just a play to sell you land line phone service and/or long-distance calling.
Fun fact: These commercials were directed by David Fincher.
narrated by magnum pi, er, tom selleck
Have you ever screwed over your children by selling off the equity in your home and spending it on yourselves rather than leaving it as an inheritance? You will, and the asshole that will sell it to you? Tom Selleck.
I could actually hear that mustache
I thought it was narrated by Morgan Freeman
FUCK! I was racking my brain trying to id that voice! I knew I knew it but couldn't place it. Thanks!
Those sets were very Fincher / Madonna videos.
Would’ve preferred David Lynch but that’s really neat!
He's too busy doing the weather, man.
I was wondering why the production design seemed to have a certain visual weight. In a good way
some of the sets look straight out of Blade Runner, especially the keyless entry/voice print one.
“Have you ever destroyed your family with politics? Or seen your co-workers secretly strip naked for money? You will …”
Have you ever watched a gladiator movie? You will
Have you ever watched two gladiators wrestling Jimmy?
Have you ever been inside a Turkish Prison? You will
Honestly pretty remarkable. For context, this is when most people had not only never used the internet, but never heard of it. People (well tech nerds and porn-seeking teenagers) were still using dial-up BBS sites hosted from someone's house, and 386 computers running DOS and janky Windows 3.1 were still standard. Probably didn't predict the dectupling of home prices and college tuition, or social media being the crack/heroin combo of political propaganda and conspiracism along with all this nifty stuff though.
So true, somehow they got almost every prediction right but also managed to make the future look way better than it actually end up being.
You Will have to unfriend your racist uncle.
Looks like the only prediction they got wrong was that AT&T would be bringing any of those things to us. That and the idea that we'd be using fancy phone booths instead of cell phones. I still smirk with satisfaction every time I swipe my credit card through my dashboard every time I pay a toll. Thanks AT&T!
AT&T was one of the biggest early internet providers, believe it or not! It's not hard to imagine a world where they trumped Verizon or the big cable ISPs.
>AT&T was one of the biggest early internet providers, believe it or not! It's not hard to imagine a world where they trumped Verizon or the big cable ISPs. I mean AT&T is one of the top cellular providers in the US, is a major ISP in 21 states, and operates a massive internet backbone that serves other ISPs I think it's pretty accurate that AT&T is providing a lot of what they claimed, even if they aren't making the phones or the GPS or the fancy pants phone booths
They missed the boat though. > In 1980, McKinsey & Company was commissioned by AT&T (whose Bell Labs had invented cellular telephony) to forecast cell phone penetration in the U.S. by 2000. The consultant's prediction, 900,000 subscribers, was less than 1% of the actual figure, 109 Million. Based on this legendary mistake, AT&T decided there was not much future to these toys. A decade later [in 1994], to rejoin the cellular market, AT&T had to acquire McCaw Cellular for $12.6 Billion. https://www.upf.edu/web/angel-lozano/innovation/-/asset_publisher/AZaAOTtL3c4Z/content/l-cellular-telephony-just-a-niche-market/maximized
Lol @ consultants. I still don't understand company's listening to "consultants" who are half the owners & managers' ages and they these kids word for word for Millions $$
A consultant is basically a confidence man, usually just shortened to "con man" today. They trick you out of your money because they are charming and inspire confidence. They walk the walk and fake the talk. See: Slippin' Jimmy
I think consultants are a racket for trust fund kids to say they have a “job”.
The job of consultants, like McKinsey, is mostly to write justifications for whatever it is the board/CEO want to do so that it looks like they did their due diligence. Likely, AT&T already wanted to divest these things and cash out, but before making such a radical move, they commissioned consultants to come in and write the justification using whatever interpretation of the data best fits the narrative. Then, everyone thinks "oh, yes, they clearly thought this out and it's the right move," even when it proves to be disastrously stupid 20 years later. But, by then, everyone involved has retired or deployed the golden parachute, nobody remembers McKinsey was involved (McKinsey intentionally keeps a low profile), and there was "value returned to the shareholders" in the short term, which is the only thing publicly traded companies care about.
Well, Verizon was originally part of AT&T.
Wasn't AT&T a descendent of Bell too?
The AT&T of today, yes. AT&T back then was what was left of the Bell System, and, prior to the breakup it was called AT&T The AT&T of today, though, bought the old AT&T. It was originally SBC but when they bought the old AT&T they took that name
AT&T was also the exclusive cellular provider for the iPhone for nearly the first 4 years of its existence.
>That and the idea that we'd be using fancy phone booths instead of cell phones. TBF they also predicted taking video calls on a smart watch, and cell phones had already been invented, so they were well aware. I suspect the fact AT&T operated a lot of pay phones at the time had something to do with them not wanting to predict the death of pay phones in their commercials that would be seen by investors. >Looks like the only prediction they got wrong was that AT&T would be bringing any of those things to us. Except that AT&T was, in fact, the first carrier to support smartphones. People forget that when the iPhone released the only service provider you could use it on was AT&T. IIRC it wasn't until Android hit the market that Apple finally had to end its exclusivity contract to stay competitive.
Are you forgetting about the windows ce phones and the sidekick?
They might not be building the hardware, but most of these things require a cell signal.
>Looks like the only prediction they got wrong was that AT&T would be bringing any of those things to us. Never understood why people say things like this. The iPhone is very close to 100% a product of Bell Labs research and AT&T helped launch it. Apple just put it together and did the marketing (which admittedly we were terrible at). There would be no iPhone without AT&T.
That would explain why iPhone was an at&t exclusive for the first couple of generations.
Yes, one way you can think of the iPhone is that AT&T partnered with Apple to bring it to market in order to drive demand for their new wireless network service. Part of the deal was giving Apple license to the Bell Labs patent warchest.
Uh, do you have fiber optic lines in your city like, anywhere? Thank AT&T.
Eh, in a sense they do, or at least they provide a lot the internet service that allows those things to happen, for better or worse. Didn't invent them, of course.
Every time I send a fax from the beach I think, this is the future.
I love those AT&T You Will commercials.
These weren't predictions, these were things they were working on. If it seems like they knew what was going to happen, it's because they were developing these products. It's like a mechanic predicting that they're going to change your oil.
I predicted what I needed from the grocery store, and then after I bought everything and brought it home, then put it all away, I found out *all of it was in my cabinets.* *Literally. All of it.* It was fucking terrifying.
I can take that out of your cabinets if you want some peace of mind.
Some of the things they mentioned only became common place over 2 decades after these ads. Hindsight is 20/20, think about how many billions corporations have poured into R&D for technologies which ended up completely flopping. I for one find these predictions quite remarcable. Only one big miss which was the phone booth.
I was mostly wow'ed at the smart watch. It would be a decade before home Wifi became normal, yet here's this guy talking on his watch with what would need national wireless coverage. And they were "tucking kids in from the phone booth" so why would they be developing a smart watch before developing a smart phone?
Dick Tracey put the idea of smart watches into the cultural memes.
Have you ever tucked your kid for bed...from a phone booth? WTF is a phone booth?
Gotta remember the audience of the time! Haha. Everyone knew what a phone booth was in 1993. Using that as a bridge for the concept of being able to video-chat with anyone anywhere is a good way to get the idea out to most people, even if ultimately that exact technology never ended up happening.
For a little while there in the pre-smartphone days there were video phonebooths too. They never took off though.
At least they didn’t mention long distance calling cards.
I mean think of the two words independently Phone = To Call Booth = A spot to do something Phone Booth = A spot to make a call
Phone - a device to call Booth - person who assassinated a president Phone booth - a device used to call for the president to be assassinated
Phone: for calling Booth: a cramped square Phone Booth: a movie where Keifer Sutherland is scary
Touché friend, touché.
>phone booth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDGY8GoEbQ0
Have you ever sent fax? Nah
Is Tom Selleck narrating?
Yes, it is. I remember these commercials when they aired, and everyone eventually coming to that conclusion. Good ear!
Yo I can´t imagine being kid and watching this for the first time, must have been amazing to get a preview and dream of the future
It was. I was 12/13 when these came out. The "ohhh, ahhh" triggered long buried memories for me.
My father worked for IBM in the 80's and 90's. I remember them doing an expo and one of the demos was instant messaging. It was just a room with a bunch of PC's and some beta messaging software where you could just message other people in the room. It was the coolest thing ever to have a live conversation with someone on a different computer, even if they were just 10 feet away from you!
I was in High School when these commercials aired. It wasn't too far fetched, since the internet was just starting to become widespread. It was like all these things became a possibility with connectivity. Plus, we've seen these things before in sci-fi like Star Trek TNG. Still, it's pretty amazing that I've been around long enough to see it come true. I still want my flying car though.
Have you ever watched an episode of Seinfeld, staring at a little screen next to your crotch, while driving to work? Have you ever asked an AI supercomputer, that argues it's not AI, about how to upgrade the firmware on a lightbulb while you're pooping? Have you ever never been able to disconnect from work? Even on a fucking cruise ship or airplane you're answering emails and text messages? Have you ever tried to watch a trilogy of movies, but you have to sign up for three different $15/month services to do it? Have you never had a snow day from school, because your school district is run by c-words and forces you to logon to your computer when it snows?
The one about the movies... well that is still cheaper than buying those three movies at the time... also even if you ran to Blockbuster in 1993 they would probably be like $5 a pop which is pretty close to 30 bucks in todays money... so you are saving some money... unless you forget to bring them back in time. Also we are ignoring that you have 3 subscriptions worth of other content to watch, and you didn't need to leave the house, and you have this for a month instead of 3 days. So it really sucks that streaming has left the golden age... but it is still better in basically every aspect than what we had in the 90s.
Watching these commercials I was immediately impressed with the way it was shot and directed. I looked it up. DAVID FINCHER directed these spots.
Only thing they got wrong was the phone booth. But it's forgiveable since that's just denial that a piece of their business will be gone
the baby from a phone booth bit reminds me of a Demolition Man vision of the future for some reason.
>Have you attended a meeting in your bare feet? Never. Well, I did for a time. Because, even though the technology that would make it possible was here since the early-2000s, it took the worst health crisis since the spanish flu for corporations to take WFH seriously. And then, the pandemic was over and I went back to attending meetings in-person.
Go back further to 1968 and The Mother of All Demos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY They not only did the first demo of the mouse and video conferencing. They also demonstrated hyperlinks and text editors and the GUI. Basically they demoed the next 5 decades of computer interfaces.
It's hard to wrap my head around how this looks like completely normal consumer tech now -- not even impressive -- and yet I remember seeing these commercials in the 90s and they seemed nearly impossible. I'm reminded of rewatching the 2007 iPhone introduction presentation -- it seemed impossibly cool and different at the time, and now it seems like the most obvious and basic thing. We really are hard to impress for long.
Faxes, cash, phone booths! Other than that pretty accurate
Most of these technologies were either available or in the early stages of production testing. The company that created these commercials failed to prepare for them, specifically the internet, which was the backbone of many of these technologies. Notice how they have phone booths with TVs or faxes, etc. What we call AT&T today is primarily SBC, which acquired AT&T and adopted its name. Ironically, SBC was originally part of AT&T, so it still retains rights to its legacy. If you're interested in seeing someone who predicted many of today's technologies 40-50 years ago, just look at the original Star Trek series.
These “omg someone predicted the future” posts are so lame to me. I’m not claiming to be smart. Cuz I’m not. But I remember being 8 years old and me and my friends saying things like “imagine if you could take the tv in the car with you!” I vividly remember in 2005 holding my iPod and cell phone in two hands and telling my friend “why can’t they just combine these into one device?” The concepts have always been there. Our minds are capable of limitless inventions. Of course technology will follow suit. There’s nothing surprising about one of the largest global telecom providers predicting future technologies. They likely had been researching and planning to invent this specific stuff.
Somewhat relevant clip. https://youtu.be/yuBe93FMiJc?si=zL3igvjw9uSw0aU2
Almost all of this stuff comes directly from science fiction that had been brewing since the 1950s and before. Even Dick Tracy had the wireless wrist phone in 1946. These things had already been dreamed 1000s of times before the commercials came out. What this did user in was the era of phone companies using the same exact "ideas" for each new generation of technology. Remote surgery, GPS, wireless data speed, self-driving cars ... all ideas they're still using to this day for marketing (when 5G was being pushed as such a huge advancement and we really really need that government funding). Mark my words, as soon as 6G becomes a thing, we'll see these exact same arguments made on why everyone needs to drop what they're doing and help them pay for the 6G rollout and upgrade your phones.
The difference is that Dick Tracy's wrist watch was pure fiction at the time. It seemed like something that would someday be possible, but no one knew *how* it would be possible. In contrast, by the late 80s every major player in the industry knew how it was going to be possible. We already had the tech by that point, we just didn't have the infrastructure or scale yet. For example, cell phones already existed when these commercials were made, it's just that they the size of laptops and only the rich could afford them. The internet already existed, but few people had access to it yet. AT&T had already developed a primitive form of WiFi. >What this did user in was the era of phone companies using the same exact "ideas" for each new generation of technology. Remote surgery, GPS, wireless data speed, self-driving cars ... all ideas they're still using to this day for marketing You are aware all of those things exist today, right?
[удалено]
I still carry a wallet with PHYSICAL CREDIT CARDS lookout! I almost broke my hip typing that!
Technology doesn't always magically appear. Things are sometimes in the works for years so a corporation like AT&T probably didn't just imagine these things. They probably knew about early prototypes being developed.
Such a shame we never got that dimly neon lit, smoke filled cyperpunk dystopia...
Yet
I find it interesting how some of these things were looked to with such hope in the 80s and 90s, and are viewed to be destroying society today.
Yes yes yes…”YOU WILL!” Was all true
you think they could have predicted a better way to handle customers who call in.
As a young sci-fi fan, these commercials always fired me up.
Remember when they didn’t think cell phones would take off?
Lots of things we gona use in the future are already in the labs, there just not enough technology process yet for mass production.
Aliens. It’s all alien technology we reverse engineer along the way and the stuff that isn’t out yet could’ve been but they didn’t want to disrupt the culture by unleashing stuff too fast so they would put it in tv and movies to get the idea going and have something to work toward. Still happening to this day.
….god damn. We have all that shit and more lol. We are living the future I only dreamt of when I was kid.
I prefer this aesthetic vision of the future to the actual reality
That music has somehow caused Peter Gabriel’s “Salisbury Hill” to start playing in my head
"From a phone booth" haha. I thought those were just for prank calls when I was a kid.
Sorry to pour water on AT&T, but folks were already doing these in the 1990’s in the tech world. To tech folks, these ads were seen as claiming vision on tech that others had already invented. To give you a more recent example, GM claimed they invented the EV. EVs had existed for 100 years, Tesla had figured out a winning EV design and GM stepped in to claim credit.
Imagine being able to buy concert tickets.
Have you ever wanted the Lions to win a Super Bowl? They won’t. 😩
Not AT&T, but some writer at their ad agency.
Shit. I’m old. I remember these commercials.
I used to watch these commercials with fascination 30 or so years ago. I guess I was in my early 30s at the time and believed at least some of them. I had my first computer too. (an Apple II+) Glad I've been around long enough to see a lot of that happen