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 with

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