have you ever been forced by your TV to eat peaches? or been transported to an alternate reality where you lost your piglet? you will. and the company that will bring it to you: AT&T
It's kind of funny to me that every single one of these more or less came true with one notable exception: "Have you ever carried your medical history in your wallet?" As it stands today, at least in the US, most people's medical history is still fragmented across dozens of proprietary, non-interoperable EMR systems or locked away in paper charts in doctors' offices. I can't think of a single company that's tried to play in the personal health portal space—Google included—that hasn't failed utterly.
Digitization of health data has increased massively since 93' of course, but the landscape is still completely Balkanized and there is a growing body of clinicians who believe healthcare IT is actively making healthcare worse.[1] Put another way, the idea of a complete, centralized, useful medical medical history being available for everyone in the US still seems like a pipe dream. Interesting discussion to be had about how, in this particular industry, progress has been so slow...
In Ontario 15 years ago, my health card had a mag stripe they could swipe. But I don't know if it pulled up my medical file or if that stripe is still on the health cards.
Part of it, along with my photo, a hologram, and 5 year expiry date, was really meant to prevent insurance fraud from out of province people. ie: Americans.
Ontario health cards still have the mag stripe, 2D bar code, and photo hologram. I don't think they've changed since the old red and white cards that didn't have photos.
Australia is adopting a single source for medical history. I'm half-excited and half-terrified. It will be a goldmine for research over time. And possibly (probably) a goldmine for bad actors.
Context for those outside of Australia - The Australian government developed a digital health record system, My Health Record, without ensuring proper protection of the data (42 data breaches in 2017-18 [1]).
There were also no safeguards or legislation in place to prevent employers, insurers or authorities from being granted access to your health record at launch.
Same. Nefarious purposes aside, their track record with technology over here seems to make a "Nobody could see it coming!" data loss moment inevitable.
It may not be unified, but you can install the app for each of your provider's EMR systems (which are mostly all front ends to the same Epic Systems multi-tenant backend)
I went through some medical issues a few years ago and took to carrying all of my medical records on a tiny USB flash drive. I took this to a few consultations and doctors could not use it due to policy and/or fear of plugging an unvetted device into their system. It's a terrible outcome of the modern security landscape that the only path is cloud storage for our medical records.
I consider FaceTime or Skype to be a good enough representation of this. It's still in the spirit of it. Something along the lines of "phones will be able to do video calls. And so wherever you are while you're away -- at a hotel or even on the side of the street -- you will be able to tuck your baby".
The only thing they missed was that you'd be able to carry such phones on your person, in your pocket. They couldn't fathom that we'd get really good at packing all that functionality into something so small.
This was right at end of of life for AT&T as an innovator, but I don't think people really appreciate just how much AT&T did for technology. Sure, they had a monopoly. Government backed, really. But you can trace just about every piece of modern tech back to Bell Labs or someone who worked there. The transistor itself, UNIX, the C programming language, the laser, CCDs, solar panels, and the list goes on. I don't think there's ever been a company before or since that has done so much.
I can't help but wonder what a modern day Bell Labs would be able to do.
I’m convinced AT&T did all those things because it was a monopoly. Look at what happened to Xerox after the DOJ killed it’s copier monopoly by forcing it to license its patents. PARC rapidly went downhill. Companies in highly competitive markets can’t really afford capital intensive innovation.
This. Competition and rational buyers with perfect information will move prices close to production costs plus risk compensation. There's no room for anything more than incremental innovation and quick wins at those kinds of companies.
Bell did amazing research under that monopoly, the downside was that they also buried some of it.
They had magnetic storage and an answering machine in the 30s, but were terrified that it might reduce demand for telephone services, so they suppressed the technology for sixty years.
Maybe that one would have never come to light without their help anyway, but they also fought inventions of outsiders that touched the telephone network, under the monopoly protection laws that allowed them to control anything "connected to" their network.
Probably the most absurd example is when they fought to stop people from using a physical barrier to make phone calls a little less loud:
A few months ago I ordered a book on a whim called "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation." [0]
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it and how much I learned. There were amazing minds at Bell Labs who were given free reign to innovate (as a direct result of AT&T's huge monopoly and revenue stream) and ended up laying the groundwork for many ideas and concepts we take for granted today.
The book is so dense with information and anecdotes but I'd still consider it a page-turner. I highly recommend it.
There is a 'modern day' Bell Labs. Look at Air-Gig (for example). I worked with one of the top AT&T inventors (just earned his 200th U.S. Patent).
Nokia Labs owns what was Lucent, which was the direct descendant of Bell Labs.
Really, that campaign is a great way of showing younger folk just what they're taking for granted, and what used to be thought of as "futuristic", and how close the present matches the predicted future.
Me too, and that's a good point. Judging from comnents above, I don't think viewers today (who weren't used to life before the internet and mobile) don't really grasp the level of foresight required at the time to be so spot on (with the exception of the phone booth still being a thing).
I'm sure there's another name for it, but I call it the "Bob Dylan Effect". Basically, if you were born after or too young to remember something having a revolutionary and influential in scope as Dylan was (for music and culture), the impact becomes so woven into the fabric of life that in the wake of the revolution, it's difficult for most people who didn't live through it to grasp the magnutude of the impact.
I have a lot of friends who hear Dylan and say "meh, sounds like the same old folk music, I don't get what the big deal is about". But that's the point! Where do you think that sound and approach to music came from? Seems to be the same case with the internet and mobile. Everything seems obvious now, so the ideas of people who really were ahead of their time, simply seem (to some people) like obvious inevitabilities, when that's not at all the case.
Note that something like the moon landing doesn't fall into this "Bob Dylan affect". The moon landing today is still as captivating as it was when it happened. That's because the space race didn't persist, and people aren't taking vacations to Moon City, so we're not really in the wake of a space revolution. But, you bet your sweet bippy that in 80 years, well after Musk gets humans to Mars, there will be someone saying "meh, what's the big deal - of course we were going to get to Mars"... when in reality, without a visionary like Musk, we'd still be floating around the planet and moon poking weightless blobs of water (a.k.a. videos I can't stop watching once I start).
> My hypothesis – and I don’t know if it’s true – is that this is only cliched now because Sartre won. The point of studying Sartre is not to learn that you choose your own identity, but to read him backward – to start with this idea that choosing your own identity is obvious, and then read Sartre to learn exactly how controversial it was at the time and what sorts of arguments Sartre had to go through to get people to accept it, and eventually understand the position that the original reader of Sartre was supposed to have started with. If you succeed, you might still believe that you choose your own identity, but you’ll also understand that this isn’t an obvious necessary fact of the universe, that there used to be people who believed you didn’t and that they had some good arguments too.
don't really grasp the level of foresight required at the time
Is there anything much to grasp there, though? These are fairly straightforward near-future sort of extrapolation of then-existing technology, for an ad. "A colour Newton that actually works and you can use on the beach" is hardly some mind-blowing prediction nor was it intended to be.
At a time where it took hours to download a picture, pagers were more popular than cell phones, WML/WAP wasn't even a dream yet, and e-Commerce did not exist, these ads were pretty prescient.
Sure, but they are prescient in a completely obvious way. The bit I'm questioning is the 'level of foresight'. 'Faxing from the beach' required exactly zero foresight.
These kinds of future looking ideas are always terribly wrong in the small details, so its important to look at what the general prediction was. The thinkers behind these things had to settle a vague predictive idea like "video phones" on some kind of physical representation in order to ground it enough to make the advertisement, but didn't know enough about the small bits the future would hold to make it exactly what's come to pass.
So you can sort of score how good future predictions are based on these broad ideas even if the particulars didn't work out. "People will generally start to commute on personal flying vehicles" is one that hasn't really come to pass in any form, so the it's a bad prediction. But these ones are really stellar.
I think even more importantly, these ones were so provocative and the grounding in the particulars was so plausible that an entire generation of engineers grew up remembering these video and trying to make the prediction self-fulfilling. Thus these videos were both drivers of innovation as well as prophecy. There's an overly academic book on this topic with a great title that I think captures this well: "The Dreams our Stuff is Made of"
The biggest prediction here that underlies all of these predictions is that there is going to be a global communications capability that enables most of the things in the ads -- and it was going to be so ubiquitous, commoditized and possess so much bandwidth and low latency that anybody could use it anywhere. In 1993, this wasn't a forgone conclusion -- Windows 95 didn't even ship with a built-in TCP/IP stack.
The obvious thing they missed was miniaturization and device convergence. Most of the activities here involve people still going to fixed or installed devices -- the smartphone was never considered.
> Windows 95 didn't even ship with a built-in TCP/IP stack.
Are you sure about that? Win 3.11 did not, you had to install trumpet winsock, but win95 did have winsock.dll shipped with it IIRC. You may have had to separately install it, but it was on your handy win95 cd-rom IIRC
I’m over 40 so I remember this watching this as high schooler who grew up on Hayes and usrobotics courier modems dialing out to local bbs in search of free pr0n.
Anyway... these appear pretty prescient. However given technologies available in 1993, I actually find almost all of these pretty laughable as examples.
Would’ve been cool if it were made in 1973 though.
I remember when these commercials came out, they seemed annoying - just corporate hype with nothing real. There was even a parody on some show (SNL?) that made fun of them: "Have you ever been seduced by your toaster? You will." Of course the real predictor from 1993 was Demolition Man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnSIOlF132w
Have you ever had your phone gain access to a "5G" network with a simple software update? Or had that same update not actually increase the speed of your network traffic? You will. And the company that'll bring it to you? AT&T.
AT&T is the combination of several "Baby Bells", including Bellsouth. I worked at Bellsouth (Advanced Networks) in the early-mid 90's. Bellsouth was a technology leader among the Baby Bells (but were too cautious buying other Bell's).
Anyway, there were a ton of innovations at Bellsouth, but Marketing was always one of the biggest drivers, as was Finance. And that is what prevented 'Fiber to the Home', and so many other innovations. Tons of great ideas never escaped the labs, because there was no vision for the market, or fear that one technology would cannibalize other existing revenue streams.
"driven cross country without stopping for directions", "paid a toll without slowing down", "unlocked your front door with the sound of your voice", "attended a meeting in your bare feet", and "watched the movie you wanted, when you wanted" all turned out pretty spot on. I'd be willimg to give them "sent a fax from the beach" if an emailed PDF counts as a fax.
The tablet that they show sending a fax from the beach is essentially a smartphone. The thing is that smartphones weren't popular until Apple even though they had existed.
Palm, Nokia/Symbian, Danger, and Microsoft had been pushing smartphones before the iPhone came out. BlackBerry was pushing non-touch smartphones as well. The issue is that none of them really had a compelling user experience before Apple came along. You can say that the iPhone was obvious, but no one else saw to use capacitive touchscreens at the time. Even after the iPhone came out, everyone thought that the lack of a physical keyboard was Apple's hubris and would be their downfall. Windows Mobile, Symbian, and PalmOS didn't integrate a first-class web browsing experience. Heck, I remember Windows Mobile emphasizing scroll bars rather than the natural movement that Apple introduced with the iPhone, never mind pinch to zoom.
Apple came along and showed everyone what the point of having a smartphone in your pocket was. You'd have the best music experience. You'd have the full internet for any question you'd ever have. You'd have maps. You'd have a great photos experience. Part of that is that they recognized that the capacitive technology they'd been using in iPods and trackpads for years could be used as part of a fuller operating system. Part of it is that they really spent a lot of time figuring out how people could use a touchscreen well. Others had just tried to take desktop UI concepts and put them on a touch device.
AT&T saw the emergence of the smartphone. Heck, Microsoft, Palm, Nokia/Symbian, BlackBerry, Danger, and even Google tried to build it before Apple (Google was targeting Symbian and had to "go back to the drawing board" when the iPhone was introduced). They all missed the key affordances that would drive consumer adoption. Google's pre-iPhone prototypes were basically BlackBerry/Symbian competitors. Microsoft wanted scroll bars, a start menu, and windows. Even after the iPhone, many tried pushing devices with keyboards: Moto Droid, HTC's first Android device, the Palm Pre, etc. It's not about saying "we'll have X in the future!" People saw smartphones/tablets. Heck, Star Trek had tablets in late 80s, but they didn't need them to be usable, just props. People just never figured out how to make them compelling for users before Apple did.
> The tablet that they show sending a fax from the beach is essentially a smartphone.
Except for the fact it's sending a fax.
Smartphones don't send faxes, but they could. They don't because they exist in a world where faxing someone something is a niche application, and approximately nobody would buy a smartphone based on how well it faxes. The technological culture is different. The world has changed in more ways than just "We can stick a good computer in your pocket and power it all day long" and AT&T didn't predict that.
I realize I'm partially repeating some elements of your comment, but I do have my own point to make here: In looking at history, avoid Presentism. Try to see the past on its own terms, not through the lens of the modern day. That is a learned skill, and not having it is shown by crediting people in the past with predicting things they never thought of.
I built the wireless modem that sent that fax. People often forget how primitive cell connections were. AMPS was the system, and the A or B ('B' as in 'Bell') carriers were your only choices. PenPoint OS had the notion of sporadic / opportunistic connections, and that's how one did email -- batched it up so when you'd plug in the RJ-11 you'd send/receive in batches.
The wireless (cellphone) capability would add a new dimension: on-the-go connectivity. In theory.
One of our sales guys was going to NYC and asked for us to load 'the latest build' and against our best judgement, we did. He reported back next day to us that he had successfully send a FAX to a potential client from the back seat of his cab. We all thought "What the heck! We never said that would work!" and then, "Oh, wow, looks like that worked!"
Keep in mind they were trying to convey the concept of sending a document electronically to the 1993 public. "Fax" is an easy widely understood stand-in for that even if we're not literally faxing today.
That's the point. Apple showed people what could be done with smartphone technology. Literally, Steve Jobs got on stage and played with music, maps, the web, etc. in front of people to introduce how the iPhone would be important to them. Everyone else was trying to find uses for the technology and they weren't coming up with anything compelling.
Smartphones (and PDAs) existed before the iPhone and people were trying to find that compelling combination and they were coming up with garbage like, "um, what about faxing?"
Yes, AT&T (and everyone else) didn't anticipate the iPhone, but everyone anticipated a good computer in your pocket powered all day long - they just couldn't make it a compelling experience. The iPhone is the meticulous design of applications, features, and affordances that make it a compelling user experience. Everyone kinda anticipated "internet on phones". The iPhone showed how the internet on phones could be a positive experience. Everyone anticipated music on phones. The iPhone showed how that could be the best music UI.
I don't think there's anything that the iPhone did that hadn't been done before, but poorly. The point is that a lot of it is bringing many different things together in a cohesive, compelling product. You could have bought a Windows Mobile device before the iPhone came out, but it was just crummy. Saying that it's because AT&T shows it faxing is a bit of a cop out. Microsoft had PocketPC devices for around 7 years before the iPhone. The name is literally a computer in your pocket. Everyone has been anticipating a computer in your pocket for a long time. Apple made it compelling.
It's possible that you don't remember all the talk about pocket computing, all the ads, all the failed products. They were there. Everyone was not only anticipating them, but trying to make them. They just didn't know what they were for, what the UI needed to be like, what affordances users wanted, etc.
At a certain point in time, you could download music from the internet and burn it onto a CD and nobody would find that strange. Faxes could have easily had the same fate. In a way, it's equally weird to send faxes from a smartphone than to make phone calls from a smartphone.
In 1993 I was carrying a bag phone. For millennials it was the size of a woman's purse and had an external antenna.
But by 2001 or so I had a Palm Phone. It was essentially a smart phone but it lacked color, weighed five pounds, you needed a stylus and there was no app store. My non-tech friends who didn't see the value of the web when I showed it to them in 1994 just laughed at me. They told me with complete wonderment, why would anyone ever want the internet in their pocket?
But the same mainframe execs who never saw either the mini or microcomputer coming also never thought that trend would continue.
> Anyone think it strange that a phone company wouldn't see the emergence of the smartphone?
> Guffawed when I saw those phone booth picture phones.
It's how these things usually work: The Future Is The Same, But Different
The Same: Things basically click along they way they do now. Want to make a call away from home or office? Use a payphone. Most natural thing in the world.
But Different: Well, payphones aren't going to stay the same, are they? Videophones have been a Coming Thing for decades now, so obviously we'll have Video Payphones.
All of those Coming Things. Where have they all gone?
The interesting thing to me is this: Car phones had existed for decades by that point. They'd slimmed down to bag phones for the masses, and bricks for Gordon Gekko and his proteges. But AT&T didn't prognosticate their continued slimming driving payphones into irrelevance. You don't even need the smartphone concept, which was a truly interesting convergence of cell phone and computer, to get the idea that "Cell phones getting smaller" leads to "I can carry a phone with me" leads to "I don't need a payphone" leads to payphones no longer existing.
Oh, and Bag Phone, because nobody else seems to remember them:
The collective imagination of all of humanity, when presented with new technology 20 years in the future, is always going to discover implications that any futurist or group of futurists would never think of.
Good insight! Really rings true when the guy "faxes" from the beach. They had the foresight for ubiquitous remote access, but not for a modern messaging platform. :)
See also the "minisec" from Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth (1976):
Duncan Makenzie had a new minisec, and he was not quite sure how parts of it worked.
The 'Sec was the standard size of all such units, determined by what can fit comfortably in the human hand. At a quick glance, it did not differ greatly from one of the small electronic calculators that had started coming into general use at the end of the twentieth century. It was, however, infinitely more versatile, and Duncan could not imagine what life would be like without it.
Because of the finite size of clumsy human fingers, it had no more controls than that of its ancestor of three hundred years earlier. There were fifty neat little studs; each, however, had an unlimited number of functions, according to the mode of operation - for the character visible on each stud changed according to the mode.
To be fair it was AT&T who took a chance on the iPhone, after the other major carriers had told Jobs to go pound sand and industry figures like Ballmer had publicly laughed at him.
I could see him using these commercials in his pitch to AT&T. "You said we would. It's time."
AT&T by that time was a completely different company. Southwestern Bell is now who owns the trademark and name AT&T. The AT&T company that made this commercial was largely irrelevant by 2005.
For these ads to succeed, they not only had to present a vision of the future, they also had to do so in a way that someone watching the ad could understand in just a few seconds. That doesn't leave much time for explanation.
So they chose to present things in a way that the average person in 1993 could relate to. Everyone would have been familiar with calling home from a pay phone when traveling -- so it would make sense to present a future where video calling is done from a pay phone. That doesn't necessarily mean AT&T thought this is exactly how the future would play out.
I might not be getting it, didn’t the videos also feature a PDA like device which is basically how they saw the future of portability, which is not far from our smartphones I think.
I'm sorry but I really have to point out that it is IMAX, not iMax. It's not an Apple product. Apparently the name is supposed to sound like "Eye-max".
You'll able to converse quickly/fluently/easily in real time with someone who you don't share a language with with speech recognition/machine translation/speech synthesis.
Spaceship Earth at Epcot (Disney World) actually featured this in its 1994 update (coincidentally, sponsored by and prominently featuring AT&T). (The overall theme of the ride, under AT&T's sponsorship, was the history of communications-- ultimately culminating in a scene depicting a vision of the future of global communications thanks to the internet.)
It may be the only thing out of that scene that hasn't really come to fruition yet. They show video calling-- we have that. They show telemedicine-- we have that. But it turns out that real-time, speech to speech translation is Really Hard, even as text-to-text translation has gotten massively better over the past few years.
Combined with a healthy dose of AI to minimize the pain of interacting with the machines, and to have information that you need right when you need it.
Communication with implants, such as continuous glucose monitoring to present you with a customized restaurant menu for what you should be eating right now (or meal planner for home, etc).
These commercials had a profound impact on me as a kid. I was 10 in 1993, so I was at just the right age to be thinking about the future for the first time.
;;; youwill.el --- generate meaningless marketing hype
http://www.splode.com/~friedman/software/emacs-lisp/src/youw...
I got:
have you ever been forced by your TV to eat peaches? or been transported to an alternate reality where you lost your piglet? you will. and the company that will bring it to you: AT&T