In these advertisements from 1993, telecommunications company AT&T predicts America’s technological future – which they thought would include sending mobile faxes and receiving magazines on CD-ROM.
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4 Comments
Ahhh… I love the soothing voice of Tom Selleck.
It’s funny, pretty much all of those things actually happened. But I don’t know how much AT&T had to do with it.
The truth is, at the time, AT&T likely already had prototypes of all of these technologies in the works. They weren’t predicting the what other companies would make or anything. They were telling you want they were working on making on a mass scale. The only thing really standing in their way was the infrastructure to bring it all there, which with the widespread use of the internet and cellular phones, is now here.
A couple other things… video phones never really took off… because looking at someone on the phone is creepy. And we don’t have good electronic medical records yet. I’m guessing it’s a combination of slow moving hospital networks and privacy concerns about creating a national medical database.
Electronic medical records are taking off, but the problem is hospitals don’t want to spend the money to switch over. Its actually a big problem right now, but they are slowly making the switch.
And webcams killed the video phone I think. Why spend money on a crappy video phone when you can get a webcam for like 30-40 bucks that hooks right into your computer. I do remember video phones being for sale in stores at one point, but I also remember them being terribly low quality and pretty expensive.