8 ms·

AT&T's predictions of the future (1993)

103 points by danielam 4y ago

xseparator 4y ago
These ads are pretty much directly responsible for inspiring me to work in this new Internet thing after graduating college in 1995. That and Wired magazine.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- TrueGeek 4y ago
  I graduated high school in 1995 and found these commercials so inspiring. They also got me super into the history of Bell Labs.
- kloch 4y ago
  > That and Wired magazine. I would show my Dad copies of Wired back in 1993-1995. When I finally got him set up with email and Netscape his comment was: "The magazine about the Internet is more interesting than the Internet itself!"
  - wayeq 4y ago
    possibly still true
kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
I like this prediction from "1922" [1]: Bell engineer #1: Well if we keep on adding customers as we have in the past and if our customers continue to place more and more calls, with the manual equipment we have here now... Engineer #2: ... we won't be able to give the kind of service our customers expect from us. Engineer #1: I'll make you a little bet that never happens. 2023: AT&T: How can we annoy our customers so much that they won't answer the phone? [1] https://youtu.be/rMtnvcMMtME?t=313 https://youtu.be/rMtnvcMMtME?t=313
dkfmn 4y ago
I really liked the old Qwest Ride the Light ads for the same reason. Here's the jukebox one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bdq_kH9mgS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bdq_kH9mgS4
- threeio 4y ago
  I spent so much time in Qwest datacenters in the early 2000s.. Was so happy to move out of there into Equinix.
GeorgeTirebiter 4y ago
I worked at EO when these ads were made. EO created the first "pen communicators" the EO 440 and the EO 880, which used the descendant of the CRISP arch (C RISC processor); these were AT&T chips. I 'did' the cellular module + the interface to the FAX modem (so you could 'fax from the beach'). Heck, I remember one sales guy telling us about his trip to NYC where he was in the back seat of a cab, and he faxed to his client that he would be there in a few minutes, and bang, shows up as the fax just finishes printing the output at the client. I told him just how lucky he was that it all worked, with our prototype hardware! Sale guys...
- joshu 4y ago
  I have a working EO 440 in my collection. Such an amazing and odd piece of history…
  - GeorgeTirebiter 4y ago
    EXcellent! The chief HW guy went on to Palm, and succeed. He uses his EO 440 to display a clock. So, it's still useful.
optimalsolver 4y ago
OP, do you browse r/retrofuturism by any chance?
incanus77 4y ago
I have a copy of a TV movie about Nixon's final days as president[1] that I taped in 1989. The main sponsor, and to my recollection, the only ad throughout the whole (long) movie was a series of AT&T "how to get it done" ads about the telecom future. I recall some stuff like faxing being present, but also mobile, in-the-field image sharing. Can't find it online, but they were pretty striking and I'd love to fire up the VHS stack to watch them again. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097354/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097354/
jdalgetty 4y ago
I’ve always loved these commercials so much.
mansilladev 4y ago
These also remind me of the Qwest commercials. ("Every movie.. every language.. any time") - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAxtxPAUcwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAxtxPAUcwQ The tone and cadence of the rhetorical questions in the AT&T commercials also reminds me of comedian Tom Papa ("Have you ever..? .. I have") - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhF8MZP-IkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhF8MZP-IkM
narahs 4y ago
It's pretty mindblowing for me to realize that this was what the world was like (without all these things we take for granted) when I was a toddler. We got internet at our house in '95. I remember it was a big deal and that the grown ups were super excited about it.
jeffbee 4y ago
They failed to predict that in the year 2022 all voice calls will be mutually unintelligible.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Funny how you're getting downvoted. I, too, remember when voice comms on the phone didn't suck.
  - zinekeller 4y ago
    > Funny how you're getting downvoted. Maybe because those users are outside the US with reasonably-good, (nearly) spam-free cellular infrastructure with companies and regulators that actually cared, and so were confused with the assertion that is not applicable globally?
    - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      It's the actual sound quality of cellular comms vs classic analog phone comms that's the issue. AFAIK this is pretty much universal internationally. Noise canceling + basically half duplex sound, high latency, low quality in general, it's not what it used to be. It used to be easier and pleasant to talk to people, now it's a chore.
dang 4y ago
Related. Others? Don't miss the great comments from Bell Labs people in the June 2010 thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444866). “You Will”, AT&T's ad campaign (1993) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25829007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25829007 - Jan 2021 (2 comments) AT&T 1993 “You Will” Ads [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19504544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19504544 - March 2019 (100 comments) AT&T's 1993 “You Will” ads were remarkably accurate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11246081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11246081 - March 2016 (4 comments) AT&T's “You Will” (1993) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9415693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9415693 - April 2015 (1 comment) AT&T's predictions of 2014 in 1994 were surprisingly accruate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6972473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6972473 - Dec 2013 (3 comments) AT&T 1993-1994 'You Will' Ad campaign [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6871467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6871467 - Dec 2013 (1 comment) AT&T nailed the future, in 1993 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5373689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5373689 - March 2013 (1 comment) AT&T You Will Ads From 1993 - Amazingly accurate predictions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2068344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2068344 - Jan 2011 (1 comment) AT&T 1993 "You Will" Ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444866 - June 2010 (39 comments) AT&T's 1993 "You Will" Ads (excellent foresight) [vid] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=503709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=503709 - March 2009 (1 comment)
maupin 4y ago
Without seeing the ads, I can still recall the music.
taftster 4y ago
These are really good ads. I remember watching them as a younger person, not realizing how profound or accurate they were. But of course, it's also interesting to compare it to the actual world we live today. The most notable thing is the unification of all these futuristic ideas into a single platform, the modern day smart phone. What I see in the AT&T ads are seemingly all different individual devices operating with various independent protocols and support infrastructure. There's a commonality that AT&T is getting at, the early internet, but the devices themselves were never imagined as a single platform. A video screen in a phone booth, for example. These ads remind me that the iphone (and other smartphone brands) have so fundamentally changed the way we live in just 2 decades. AT&T might have had some to do with our world, but I don't think anyone could really see it or execute the way Steve Jobs could.
- brewdad 4y ago
  While certainly there is an element of the "unknowable" unknowns that led to the singualar device dominating so many of these predictions, I have to also think that some of the examples are used to make these future scenarios relatable to the 1993 present uses. For example, I can't imagine anyone at AT&T forward thinking enough to envision sending business communications from the beach thought we would be sending literal faxes.
- stuart78 4y ago
  I think the other element is a move from hardware to software. The zoom calls that replace the video phone booth are not just iPhones, but also conference rooms, computers, iPads. Smartphones bring all these solutions together, but the variety of ways to engage on such a wide variety of platforms is just as transformative.
- blincoln 4y ago
  The ads have great production design and direction, but I remember watching them in 1993 and thinking that they had just read/watched a bunch of 80s/early 90s sci fi and decided to take credit for other people's ideas without doing the hard work of implementing any of it. From previous discussions, it sounds like Bell Labs really did have prototypes of at least some of it, so I was wrong there, but I'm a little surprised if anyone had doubts as to whether any of those things would exist at some point in coming decades. For context, CD Connection was already selling CDs over the internet (telnet interface) when these ads aired. The King County (Washington) library system had a remote media-checkout system (can't remember if it was just dialup or also on the internet) where they'd mail you the material. Consumer GPS devices already existed, even if they were clunky and couldn't display a 3D map. Typical end users didn't have the bandwidth in their homes to do things like colour videoconferencing or Netflix-style on-demand video, but lots of folks were having text-based international discussions. I suppose a lot of it wasn't consumer-friendly enough for most people to have seen it in 1993, though.
kube-system 4y ago
It's somehow sad that they got everything so perfectly right except "the company that'll bring it to you".
- drewg123 4y ago
  I came here to say exactly that. However, in one sense of the word, we do owe a lot of the modern tech stack to ATT. Between their invention of transistors, and their invention of UNIX, they do form the basis of the modern tech stack that all these inventions depend on. (and yes, I know we're not running AT&T UNIX, but BSD was derived from it, and Linux / Minix etc were inspired by UNIX).
  - kube-system 4y ago
    No doubt. But it's just even more ironic that other people took the phone company's technology to build the phone company's vision just shows how much they squandered their potential. Cash cows really are a death knell for progress.
- taftster 4y ago
  Right. That's fascinating, isn't it. @dang's link to the June 2010 comments[1] tells the story: > Bell Labs was upset because AT&T made those commercials without consulting us. A PR company thought up all the ideas. We had zero projects internally working on such products. So the PR firm (probably just a single person at the firm) was obviously quite visionary. I wonder who that person was and if they ever surfaced at another company that was actually able to bring some of these ideas forward. It could just be like writing science fiction, and those ideas felt so futuristic that they weren't expected to actually come to pass. But man, give credit to those ideas, because almost all of them came true pretty close to the ad's depiction. It's one thing to write science fiction that is so outlandish that we know it's not even likely in our life spans (Star Trek, etc.). But it's quite another thing to write some sort of "fiction" that is just right on the boundary of plausible and achievable within a decade or two. Those people that can see 10-20 years in the future, they're the ones I'm jealous of. That's a talent that I just don't have. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444866
petilon 4y ago
If you were to make an ad like that today, what would your predictions be?
- entwife 4y ago
  Vaccines that cure cancer.
  - uejfiweun 4y ago
    Wow, how exactly would such a thing be possible?
- stolenmerch 4y ago
  In 1993 it was all about instant telecommunication coming in the future, which seemed like crazy scifi at the time. Now I think the next horizon is instant simulation. In 30 years, we'll be able to simulate just about anything we want. Instant feature film prompted by your own ideas? You will. Talking to your dead grandma? You will. Assistants that go to work for you? You will. And the company that will bring it to you is AT&T, probably.
  - missedthecue 4y ago
    "simulate just about anything we want. Instant feature film prompted by your own ideas" I haven't often fantasized about having a tool like this when trying to explain abstract or arcane concepts. How amazing would that be.
- janalsncm 4y ago
  This is a great question for its own Ask HN. It feels like we are on the brink of some great breakthroughs outside of pure software. Delivery robots are here but will become more available. Ditto with self-driving cars. mRNA vaccines are now proven to work. Genetic sequencing is very affordable. Treatments customized to your DNA will become common. Real-time footage of earth will be available just like Google Earth is now. Along with ubiquitous facial recognition, there will be major implications on privacy and national security.
smm11 4y ago
I was researching a thing called Polymer Flexible Circuits at this same time - those I spoke to talked of a future with all this sort of stuff and more. One guy said he was working on 'circuit' that would be small enough to carry in a pocket, then fold out to have a larger presentation surface for words and images. It's worth noting that AT&T was the exclusive carrier for the first iPhone.
- elsonrodriguez 4y ago
  > It's worth noting that AT&T was the exclusive carrier for the first iPhone. That was a happy accident due to the acquisition of Cingular by AT&T
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    Which was just AT&T Wireless' re-brand. Which sucked for me. I had moved to T-Mobile from AT&T due to their shitty service. Then Apple gave all full-time employees an iPhone the summer of its release. I had to go back to AT&^H^H^H Cingular in order to use the phone. Back into the cold embrace of AT&T's crappy service and support.
    - toast0 4y ago
      It's more complex than that. AT&T Wireless, launched in 1987 under another name, was invested in by post breakup AT&T in 1992 and merged into AT&T in 1994, and then spun off in 2001. Cingular was mostly Southwestern Bell and a couple more baby bells (SBC) and Bell South. In 2004, Cingular bought AT&T wireless and merged it under the Cingular Brand. In 2005, SBC bought the rest of AT&T. In 2006, SBC bought Bell South and therefore owned the whole Cingular, and rebranded it as AT&T. In 2007, when the iPhone was released, you would have been forced to deal with "the new AT&T", but when you left, you were probably dealing with "the old AT&T", they both suck, but differently. :)
      - giantrobot 4y ago
        I knew there was some Baby Bell history I was eliding. I remember a long time ago in a Wired (I think) there was a two page spread with the convoluted family trees of the various national cellular providers. It was very convoluted.
casey2 4y ago
Right about everything except AT&T being the company that will bring it to you. OOF
- danielrhodes 4y ago
  They weren't wrong. They are one of the biggest cell carriers, backbone, and broadband providers. I'm not sure what role they imagine they would take, but it is similar to the role they have had in the past.
  - Eisenstein 4y ago
    The AT&T that exists now was not the AT&T that existed when the ads were made. Cingular was a cell phone company that merged with AT&T in the early 00s in order to get their brand name. It is really Cingular that is the modern AT&T. (Yes, I know that they were split into baby-bells and Cingular was at one point also AT&T but at the point in time the commercials were made, AT&T was a distinct company from the Bells that become the conglomerated cell phone/internet providers that exist today in Verizon and AT&T.)
    - Aloha 4y ago
      Southwestern Bell is really the modern AT&T
      - nirav72 4y ago
        Yep. Mashing up the baby bells again started with SW Bell after it became SBC. Then SBC bought up AT&T Corp. Which is now the AT&T we know.
        filmgirlcw 4y ago
        Yes, but most of the backhaul and network stuff was BellSouth, which became Cingular, which acquired AT&T (which had been bought by SBC) and then the head of Cingular (who had been at AT&T before it was split up) purposefully changed the name to AT&T, even tho Cingular was the acquirer. But all the baby bells were just operating separately in name only in many regards. My mother—in-law worked for AT&T or one of the baby bells her entire career, across multiple states and systems. It was a lot more similar than a lot of people realize. Once wireless became a thing and being regional became much more arbitrary (because a local telephone provider doesn’t matter in the age of nationwide wireless), the re-unification made sense. And aside from MCI and Sprint, neither of which had good histories, or the German-government propped up T-Mobile (American T-Mobile was largely subsidized by Deutsche Telekom in its early years, first launching nationwide as VoiceStream), no one was able to make a go at competing against the bells anyway. The fact that AT&T and Verizon still dominate the industry and that both used to be the same 40 years ago really isn’t much of a surprise. I’m generally a fan of deregulation, but the phone situation shows that breaking up the monopolies really didn’t cause any changes, especially when the real change on the horizon was only something very rich companies could invest in.

103 points by danielam 4y ago

These ads are pretty much directly responsible for inspiring me to work in this new Internet thing after graduating college in 1995. That and Wired magazine.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
TrueGeek 4y ago
I graduated high school in 1995 and found these commercials so inspiring. They also got me super into the history of Bell Labs.
kloch 4y ago
> That and Wired magazine. I would show my Dad copies of Wired back in 1993-1995. When I finally got him set up with email and Netscape his comment was: "The magazine about the Internet is more interesting than the Internet itself!"
- wayeq 4y ago
  possibly still true

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago

I like this prediction from "1922" [1]: Bell engineer #1: Well if we keep on adding customers as we have in the past and if our customers continue to place more and more calls, with the manual equipment we have here now... Engineer #2: ... we won't be able to give the kind of service our customers expect from us. Engineer #1: I'll make you a little bet that never happens. 2023: AT&T: How can we annoy our customers so much that they won't answer the phone? [1] https://youtu.be/rMtnvcMMtME?t=313 https://youtu.be/rMtnvcMMtME?t=313

dkfmn 4y ago

I really liked the old Qwest Ride the Light ads for the same reason. Here's the jukebox one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bdq_kH9mgS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bdq_kH9mgS4

threeio 4y ago
I spent so much time in Qwest datacenters in the early 2000s.. Was so happy to move out of there into Equinix.

GeorgeTirebiter 4y ago

I worked at EO when these ads were made. EO created the first "pen communicators" the EO 440 and the EO 880, which used the descendant of the CRISP arch (C RISC processor); these were AT&T chips. I 'did' the cellular module + the interface to the FAX modem (so you could 'fax from the beach'). Heck, I remember one sales guy telling us about his trip to NYC where he was in the back seat of a cab, and he faxed to his client that he would be there in a few minutes, and bang, shows up as the fax just finishes printing the output at the client. I told him just how lucky he was that it all worked, with our prototype hardware! Sale guys...

joshu 4y ago
I have a working EO 440 in my collection. Such an amazing and odd piece of history…
- GeorgeTirebiter 4y ago
  EXcellent! The chief HW guy went on to Palm, and succeed. He uses his EO 440 to display a clock. So, it's still useful.

optimalsolver 4y ago

OP, do you browse r/retrofuturism by any chance?

incanus77 4y ago

I have a copy of a TV movie about Nixon's final days as president[1] that I taped in 1989. The main sponsor, and to my recollection, the only ad throughout the whole (long) movie was a series of AT&T "how to get it done" ads about the telecom future. I recall some stuff like faxing being present, but also mobile, in-the-field image sharing. Can't find it online, but they were pretty striking and I'd love to fire up the VHS stack to watch them again. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097354/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097354/

jdalgetty 4y ago

I’ve always loved these commercials so much.

mansilladev 4y ago

These also remind me of the Qwest commercials. ("Every movie.. every language.. any time") - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAxtxPAUcwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAxtxPAUcwQ The tone and cadence of the rhetorical questions in the AT&T commercials also reminds me of comedian Tom Papa ("Have you ever..? .. I have") - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhF8MZP-IkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhF8MZP-IkM

narahs 4y ago

It's pretty mindblowing for me to realize that this was what the world was like (without all these things we take for granted) when I was a toddler. We got internet at our house in '95. I remember it was a big deal and that the grown ups were super excited about it.

jeffbee 4y ago

They failed to predict that in the year 2022 all voice calls will be mutually unintelligible.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
Funny how you're getting downvoted. I, too, remember when voice comms on the phone didn't suck.
- zinekeller 4y ago
  > Funny how you're getting downvoted. Maybe because those users are outside the US with reasonably-good, (nearly) spam-free cellular infrastructure with companies and regulators that actually cared, and so were confused with the assertion that is not applicable globally?
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    It's the actual sound quality of cellular comms vs classic analog phone comms that's the issue. AFAIK this is pretty much universal internationally. Noise canceling + basically half duplex sound, high latency, low quality in general, it's not what it used to be. It used to be easier and pleasant to talk to people, now it's a chore.

dang 4y ago

Related. Others? Don't miss the great comments from Bell Labs people in the June 2010 thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444866). “You Will”, AT&T's ad campaign (1993) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25829007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25829007 - Jan 2021 (2 comments) AT&T 1993 “You Will” Ads [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19504544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19504544 - March 2019 (100 comments) AT&T's 1993 “You Will” ads were remarkably accurate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11246081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11246081 - March 2016 (4 comments) AT&T's “You Will” (1993) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9415693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9415693 - April 2015 (1 comment) AT&T's predictions of 2014 in 1994 were surprisingly accruate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6972473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6972473 - Dec 2013 (3 comments) AT&T 1993-1994 'You Will' Ad campaign [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6871467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6871467 - Dec 2013 (1 comment) AT&T nailed the future, in 1993 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5373689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5373689 - March 2013 (1 comment) AT&T You Will Ads From 1993 - Amazingly accurate predictions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2068344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2068344 - Jan 2011 (1 comment) AT&T 1993 "You Will" Ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444866 - June 2010 (39 comments) AT&T's 1993 "You Will" Ads (excellent foresight) [vid] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=503709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=503709 - March 2009 (1 comment)

maupin 4y ago

Without seeing the ads, I can still recall the music.

taftster 4y ago

These are really good ads. I remember watching them as a younger person, not realizing how profound or accurate they were. But of course, it's also interesting to compare it to the actual world we live today. The most notable thing is the unification of all these futuristic ideas into a single platform, the modern day smart phone. What I see in the AT&T ads are seemingly all different individual devices operating with various independent protocols and support infrastructure. There's a commonality that AT&T is getting at, the early internet, but the devices themselves were never imagined as a single platform. A video screen in a phone booth, for example. These ads remind me that the iphone (and other smartphone brands) have so fundamentally changed the way we live in just 2 decades. AT&T might have had some to do with our world, but I don't think anyone could really see it or execute the way Steve Jobs could.

brewdad 4y ago
While certainly there is an element of the "unknowable" unknowns that led to the singualar device dominating so many of these predictions, I have to also think that some of the examples are used to make these future scenarios relatable to the 1993 present uses. For example, I can't imagine anyone at AT&T forward thinking enough to envision sending business communications from the beach thought we would be sending literal faxes.
stuart78 4y ago
I think the other element is a move from hardware to software. The zoom calls that replace the video phone booth are not just iPhones, but also conference rooms, computers, iPads. Smartphones bring all these solutions together, but the variety of ways to engage on such a wide variety of platforms is just as transformative.
blincoln 4y ago
The ads have great production design and direction, but I remember watching them in 1993 and thinking that they had just read/watched a bunch of 80s/early 90s sci fi and decided to take credit for other people's ideas without doing the hard work of implementing any of it. From previous discussions, it sounds like Bell Labs really did have prototypes of at least some of it, so I was wrong there, but I'm a little surprised if anyone had doubts as to whether any of those things would exist at some point in coming decades. For context, CD Connection was already selling CDs over the internet (telnet interface) when these ads aired. The King County (Washington) library system had a remote media-checkout system (can't remember if it was just dialup or also on the internet) where they'd mail you the material. Consumer GPS devices already existed, even if they were clunky and couldn't display a 3D map. Typical end users didn't have the bandwidth in their homes to do things like colour videoconferencing or Netflix-style on-demand video, but lots of folks were having text-based international discussions. I suppose a lot of it wasn't consumer-friendly enough for most people to have seen it in 1993, though.

kube-system 4y ago

It's somehow sad that they got everything so perfectly right except "the company that'll bring it to you".

drewg123 4y ago
I came here to say exactly that. However, in one sense of the word, we do owe a lot of the modern tech stack to ATT. Between their invention of transistors, and their invention of UNIX, they do form the basis of the modern tech stack that all these inventions depend on. (and yes, I know we're not running AT&T UNIX, but BSD was derived from it, and Linux / Minix etc were inspired by UNIX).
- kube-system 4y ago
  No doubt. But it's just even more ironic that other people took the phone company's technology to build the phone company's vision just shows how much they squandered their potential. Cash cows really are a death knell for progress.
taftster 4y ago
Right. That's fascinating, isn't it. @dang's link to the June 2010 comments[1] tells the story: > Bell Labs was upset because AT&T made those commercials without consulting us. A PR company thought up all the ideas. We had zero projects internally working on such products. So the PR firm (probably just a single person at the firm) was obviously quite visionary. I wonder who that person was and if they ever surfaced at another company that was actually able to bring some of these ideas forward. It could just be like writing science fiction, and those ideas felt so futuristic that they weren't expected to actually come to pass. But man, give credit to those ideas, because almost all of them came true pretty close to the ad's depiction. It's one thing to write science fiction that is so outlandish that we know it's not even likely in our life spans (Star Trek, etc.). But it's quite another thing to write some sort of "fiction" that is just right on the boundary of plausible and achievable within a decade or two. Those people that can see 10-20 years in the future, they're the ones I'm jealous of. That's a talent that I just don't have. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444866

petilon 4y ago

If you were to make an ad like that today, what would your predictions be?

entwife 4y ago
Vaccines that cure cancer.
- uejfiweun 4y ago
  Wow, how exactly would such a thing be possible?
stolenmerch 4y ago
In 1993 it was all about instant telecommunication coming in the future, which seemed like crazy scifi at the time. Now I think the next horizon is instant simulation. In 30 years, we'll be able to simulate just about anything we want. Instant feature film prompted by your own ideas? You will. Talking to your dead grandma? You will. Assistants that go to work for you? You will. And the company that will bring it to you is AT&T, probably.
- missedthecue 4y ago
  "simulate just about anything we want. Instant feature film prompted by your own ideas" I haven't often fantasized about having a tool like this when trying to explain abstract or arcane concepts. How amazing would that be.
janalsncm 4y ago
This is a great question for its own Ask HN. It feels like we are on the brink of some great breakthroughs outside of pure software. Delivery robots are here but will become more available. Ditto with self-driving cars. mRNA vaccines are now proven to work. Genetic sequencing is very affordable. Treatments customized to your DNA will become common. Real-time footage of earth will be available just like Google Earth is now. Along with ubiquitous facial recognition, there will be major implications on privacy and national security.

smm11 4y ago

I was researching a thing called Polymer Flexible Circuits at this same time - those I spoke to talked of a future with all this sort of stuff and more. One guy said he was working on 'circuit' that would be small enough to carry in a pocket, then fold out to have a larger presentation surface for words and images. It's worth noting that AT&T was the exclusive carrier for the first iPhone.

elsonrodriguez 4y ago
> It's worth noting that AT&T was the exclusive carrier for the first iPhone. That was a happy accident due to the acquisition of Cingular by AT&T
- giantrobot 4y ago
  Which was just AT&T Wireless' re-brand. Which sucked for me. I had moved to T-Mobile from AT&T due to their shitty service. Then Apple gave all full-time employees an iPhone the summer of its release. I had to go back to AT&^H^H^H Cingular in order to use the phone. Back into the cold embrace of AT&T's crappy service and support.
  - toast0 4y ago
    It's more complex than that. AT&T Wireless, launched in 1987 under another name, was invested in by post breakup AT&T in 1992 and merged into AT&T in 1994, and then spun off in 2001. Cingular was mostly Southwestern Bell and a couple more baby bells (SBC) and Bell South. In 2004, Cingular bought AT&T wireless and merged it under the Cingular Brand. In 2005, SBC bought the rest of AT&T. In 2006, SBC bought Bell South and therefore owned the whole Cingular, and rebranded it as AT&T. In 2007, when the iPhone was released, you would have been forced to deal with "the new AT&T", but when you left, you were probably dealing with "the old AT&T", they both suck, but differently. :)
    - giantrobot 4y ago
      I knew there was some Baby Bell history I was eliding. I remember a long time ago in a Wired (I think) there was a two page spread with the convoluted family trees of the various national cellular providers. It was very convoluted.

casey2 4y ago

Right about everything except AT&T being the company that will bring it to you. OOF

danielrhodes 4y ago
They weren't wrong. They are one of the biggest cell carriers, backbone, and broadband providers. I'm not sure what role they imagine they would take, but it is similar to the role they have had in the past.
- Eisenstein 4y ago
  The AT&T that exists now was not the AT&T that existed when the ads were made. Cingular was a cell phone company that merged with AT&T in the early 00s in order to get their brand name. It is really Cingular that is the modern AT&T. (Yes, I know that they were split into baby-bells and Cingular was at one point also AT&T but at the point in time the commercials were made, AT&T was a distinct company from the Bells that become the conglomerated cell phone/internet providers that exist today in Verizon and AT&T.)
  - Aloha 4y ago
    Southwestern Bell is really the modern AT&T
    - nirav72 4y ago
      Yep. Mashing up the baby bells again started with SW Bell after it became SBC. Then SBC bought up AT&T Corp. Which is now the AT&T we know.
      - filmgirlcw 4y ago
        Yes, but most of the backhaul and network stuff was BellSouth, which became Cingular, which acquired AT&T (which had been bought by SBC) and then the head of Cingular (who had been at AT&T before it was split up) purposefully changed the name to AT&T, even tho Cingular was the acquirer. But all the baby bells were just operating separately in name only in many regards. My mother—in-law worked for AT&T or one of the baby bells her entire career, across multiple states and systems. It was a lot more similar than a lot of people realize. Once wireless became a thing and being regional became much more arbitrary (because a local telephone provider doesn’t matter in the age of nationwide wireless), the re-unification made sense. And aside from MCI and Sprint, neither of which had good histories, or the German-government propped up T-Mobile (American T-Mobile was largely subsidized by Deutsche Telekom in its early years, first launching nationwide as VoiceStream), no one was able to make a go at competing against the bells anyway. The fact that AT&T and Verizon still dominate the industry and that both used to be the same 40 years ago really isn’t much of a surprise. I’m generally a fan of deregulation, but the phone situation shows that breaking up the monopolies really didn’t cause any changes, especially when the real change on the horizon was only something very rich companies could invest in.