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.
> There's a commonality that AT&T is getting at, the early internet
The legacy telcos were NOT fans of the early Internet. They didn't like packet switched networks, variable sized packets, and especially best-effort delivery. That is why they spent the next 10 years trying to force ATM on everyone. They also couldn't figure out how to efficiently bill for these modern services, even up to the iPhone launch in 2007! https://money.cnn.com/2007/08/23/technology/iphone_bill/
A common thread in these commercials is high bandwidth applications (impossibly high bandwidth by 1993 standards) that would generate hefty usage fees. These applications were seen as so impractical in 1993 that the commercials were sometimes derided as an "empty promises" campaign.
Most of it did come true however, though at this point we may be wishing some of it had not - sending a "fax" or "attending a meeting" from the beach for example.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.)
Actually, Verizon is AT&T.
My current Verizon account is an AT&T account I activated in ~1994.
Cell phones were a division of AT&Ts overall business and then at some point they spun that out into Verizon. And then later they got back into mobile/cellular via Cingular, essentially competing with their old selves (Verizon).
The modern AT&T is really Southwestern Bell/SBC[0], lots of the legacy SBC management is still around even and sbc.com dominates a lot of internal IT infrastructure still.
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.
Cingular was Joint Venture between BellSouth and Southwestern Bell (SBC).
SBC also bought, Pacific Bell, Ameritech and AT&T, when it did, it changes its name to AT&T. Later they bought out BellSouth, and changed its name as well. Cingular grew in phases as they acquired former RBOC's, but once SBC bought out BellSouth, Cingular became AT&T Wireless.
The current corporate entity that calls itself AT&T is formerly SBC.
They did have a late start in the Internet space. Back in the mid-90's, it was Sprint and MCI who ran the major backbone providers. All the regional ISPs I worked with were connected to either Sprint, MCI, or UUNet. Nobody was getting T-1's to AT&T until late 90's.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
@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.
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).
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.
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.
Conversational interfaces. I don't think GPT is taking us to the singularity any time soon, but I do think it's pretty strong evidence we can go a lot further with conversational interfaces.
… yeah, I gotta be pretty bearish on that one. The basic decision tree interfaces of today can't even handle the most basic of needs. My last conversation, roughly:
[some initial menu nav omit]
AI: I can look up your order. What is your phone number?
Me: XXX-XXX-XXXX
AI: I'm sorry, I don't have an order under that number.
(This is a lie.) The conversation continues.
AI: Would you like to look up another order?
Me: Can I look up by name?
AI: Yes, I can look up by number. What is the number?
Great job.
Me: Beetlejuice.
AI: I'm sorry, I didn't understand that.
Me: Beetlejuice.
AI: I'm sorry, I didn't understand that.
Me: Beetlejuice.
AI: I'm having trouble understanding you. Let me get a human on the line.
Even if an AI could understand, it's still got to have the programming to look up orders, e.g., by that new attribute, here, name. Or… is the AI writing SQL, too? Enter Bobby Tables.
My need isn't much more than a basic decision tree, either; that level of "conversation" is sufficient / GPT isn't necessary. But … the decision tree, once it has parsed a human sentence into a correct action … has to actually be able to correctly take that action. (And, e.g., not lie.)
Of course, one I get a human on the line, I come to find out the health provider — whose AI I was having to first grovel to — … did have the order, and had just effectively perma-ignored it, without communicating that. They had blackholed my order "because" the health insurer had declined the service … despite the requested service being allegedly available for free to all Americans. The larger pattern here is that this is the sort of garbage tier service that it seems every industry in the economy is rife with these days, and is what generates probably 105% of my support calls.
And I am tired of every support call service telling me "we are experiencing above average call volume". It is mathematically impossible for the call volume to always be above average. Also, your call volume is "above average" as a result of playing stupid games, and then winning stupid prizes, like the above. There were two alternate universes: 1. the insurer did their job -> problem solved, no support call. 2. the insurer failed to do their job -> you contact the customer & relay the problem -> no support call. But, again, we go for garbage-tier-economy answer of "just ignore the problem?"
"Guaranteed two day shipping" took 8 days. The tracking number tells me the "package is out for delivery, delivery by 5pm" … at 8pm. Mass transit board tells me the 3:00pm train is delayed by 20 minutes. At 4:00pm. The list goes on and on. If you want to resolve anything, talking to a conversational AI is not going to cut it.
As another hilarious example, I was talking to a Google Home. I gave it one query, and the device answered in a feminine voice. I give it the next query, … and it responds with a masculine voice? I ask it what happened there, and of course it can't parse that, and for as much "intelligence" as what people ascribe to these things, it's lost by the third exchange. (The owners had some explanation. That's not the point.)
Oh man, that last thing bites me on a daily basis. The tldr is Google is trying and failing to recognize different people, and it used a different voice because the person it thought you were has their own assistant voice preferences set. Allegedly this is so you can tell it to turn off my lights and it knows what room you mean, or send information on a query to the correct phone.
All this information and data Google sucks up about me and it can't even recognize my voice. Goes to your larger point about software being generally shit.
My prediction for the future of personal technology (provided we don't run out of cheap non-renewables beforehand and/or don't destroy ourselves in any number of plausible scenarios) would be on-demand energy generation in a compact solid-state or completely enclosed device.
Some sort of harnessing of one of the primary forces converted to electromagnetic energy for consistent, convenient, non-explody, on-demand power for our bionic limbs and ad-supported Meta-eyes and A.I. powered babysitting robots.
I think that in 30 years, humans will not work. AI will replace software developers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, finance, etc. Robots will replace surgeons, gardeners, cooks, cleaners, construction workers, manufacturing workers, etc.
All humans will live be provided Universal Basic Income. Housing, food, clothes etc. will all be made by robots and given to humans for free.
The only jobs for humans will be dating, procreation, taking care of their offsprings (with help from robots), exercise and recreation.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.