Have You?

August 26, 2007 4:32 AM

Old enough to remember those AT&T "You Will" ads from 1993? via Barry Ritholz's The Big Picture blog.
posted by Heywood Mogroot (72 comments total)

Have you ever had your conversations monitored by the government? Without a warrant? Or any oversight? You will. And the company that'll bring it to you... AT&T.
posted by Poolio at 4:42 AM on August 26, 2007 [42 favorites]

The point from your link is a good....ATT was not what brought us that stuff. Still, it's a lesson in the strength of branding. A big reason Cingular went back to ATT for a name was that the brass perceived people understood and liked ATT better I guess. Perhaps that's the strength of ambitious, feel-good ads from 14 years ago?
posted by skepticallypleased at 5:13 AM on August 26, 2007

Ahh blast from the past, theres also another 14 minutes of other '93 AT&T stuff at Paleo-Future.
posted by ItsaMario at 5:14 AM on August 26, 2007

The point from your link is a good....ATT was not what brought us that stuff.

They didn't invent any of this, but AT&T has had a big hand in all of this as one of the planets largest telecommunications providers.

What's really funny here is how close they were, but how hilariously off they ended up being on some of these:

A fax from the beach? I guess, but let's call it email.
Tucking in your baby from a phone booth? What's a phone booth?
Opening a door with your voice? Alsmost! But here's a key card.
posted by splatta at 5:28 AM on August 26, 2007

Wasn't there an ad where someone says "Where am I? I'm in an airport," or am I getting that confused with some other company?

AT&T has had a big hand in all of this as one of the planets largest telecommunications providers.

And back in 1994, they were more than just a telecommunications provider. They also owned NCR and the assets which later became Lucent.
posted by grouse at 5:58 AM on August 26, 2007

lol phone booth lol
posted by TrialByMedia at 6:07 AM on August 26, 2007

Who's voice is that on there? It's familiar but I can't be sure and it's gonna bug me all day now...
posted by Zinger at 6:10 AM on August 26, 2007

Who's voice is that on there?

Magnum, P.I.
posted by Poolio at 6:13 AM on August 26, 2007

Tom Selek
posted by PigAlien at 6:13 AM on August 26, 2007

Tom Selleck.
posted by grabbingsand at 6:14 AM on August 26, 2007

Tucking in your baby from a phone booth? What's a phone booth?

Yea, that really struck me too. To be honest, I can't recall the last time I even saw a pay phone. Lots of people are tucking their babies in remotely, but doing it from their own laptops using a wireless hotspot and Skype.

What I find really interesting is that these commercials were made just over a decade ago, and look how much they got wrong. It shows really clearly the rapid pace of technological change, and how hard it is to predict what the future will hold.
posted by gemmy at 6:16 AM on August 26, 2007

Zinger, I was going to ask the same thing. It's definitely either a celebrity or a voiceover artist with tons of other exposure...

I was 11 in 1993, and I hardly ever watched TV. But for some reason I remember these ads vividly. I was shocked to discover they were so old...I would have thought 1997 or 1998.

Maybe I was unusually receptive to quasi-sentimental near-future pseudo-techno guesswork for an eleven year old, but these ads are weirdly etched in my brain. Thanks Heywood!
posted by scarylarry at 6:18 AM on August 26, 2007

Oh, on preview: thanks poolio, pigalien, and grabbingsand.
posted by scarylarry at 6:19 AM on August 26, 2007

I like this comment from Bob Taylor from the interesting-people discussion that inspired the blog post linked above:

When, in the late "60s, I invited AT&T/Bell Labs to be a part of the
early ARPAnet, they declined with the assertion that "packet switching won't work!"

posted by grouse at 6:20 AM on August 26, 2007

And it's only onscreen for a moment, but in the remote learning example, the student seems to be using some kind of telephone keypad to communicate with the teacher. And he refers to the students by their location ("Yes, Oakland?") -- and of course, your location would be one of the last thinks people would see on the Internet.

But yeah, this is all snarky, plate-of-beans, "lol futurists" stuff. I remember those ads, and it's really satisfying to see how many of those things are actually part of my life now.

has it really been 14 years? wow, I'm old.
posted by PlusDistance at 6:23 AM on August 26, 2007 [2 favorites]

I kind of have moments like this every time I read The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "Huh. Interesting. So this outrageous device is a handheld computer that connects remotely to a massive ever-growing global user information computer database? Well I'll be."

What I find really interesting is that these commercials were made just over a decade ago, and look how much they got wrong.

Considering the near-future projections we got from modern-era films like Blade Runner and Back to the Future, Pt. 2 I think phone booths not having video monitors is much less of a naive leap than flying cars and slave robots.

But yeah, the fax one was the funniest only because it was this great moment in time right before e-mail became the killer app of the information age. It's like those old sci-fi movies where it's the 23rd century, and the rocket ships have transistor tubes and black and white televisions.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 6:31 AM on August 26, 2007 [1 favorite]

I still haven't bought concert tickets from a cash machine, opened a door with my voice, or carried my medical history in my wallet. I feel cheated.

But the baby got tucked in by phone twice, so that's good.
posted by The Deej at 6:35 AM on August 26, 2007

On the whole, I'd say they did pretty damn well.

It also shows just how rapid the pace of change has been in a few areas over the last few years. It's been said that people always overestimate change in the short term and underestimate it in the long. The Internet didn't immediately overthrow the old ways of doing things, but very slowly, it'll change everything.

No more pay phones is an excellent example.
posted by Malor at 6:36 AM on August 26, 2007

(and that's caused by cell networks, which aren't really 'the Internet' per se, but are rapidly joining it.)
posted by Malor at 6:37 AM on August 26, 2007

They didn't invent any of this.

Actually, I (and a couple of other guys) invented one of the inventions depicted, in 1979, so I always got a kick out of the ad's implication that it was yet-to-come. I guess what was yet to come was the widespread availability to consumers: the unit I invented cost the military thousands of dollars each. And that's still true — the technology to remotely tuck your baby into bed (and I don't mean the technology to watch someone else do it) is really available now, but its costs are prohibitive (at least for baby-tucking). Maybe someday we'll all have one of those too.
posted by ubiquity at 6:45 AM on August 26, 2007 [1 favorite]

That's interesting that they were touting giant flat-screen TVs. I don't think I saw one outside a corporate setting until about 2000. Did those things exist in 1993? Wikipedia mentions under Plasma display in 1992, Fujitsu introduced the world's first 21-inch (533 mm) full-color display, LED displays were in their infancy, and that's surely not a CRT.

On the other hand, I think people have grown weary of the idea that picture phones will take over. We've been hearing that song and dance since the 1950s.
posted by zek at 6:45 AM on August 26, 2007

A fax from the beach? I guess, but let's call it email.

I hate that people still use faxes. I think they stick around because the operation is fairly simple (Unless you're me and you don't have long distance on your landline, so you have to use a phone card to fax anyone. Not fun :P) But it would be so much simpler just to email people scans of things. *sigh*

Considering the near-future projections we got from modern-era films like Blade Runner and Back to the Future, Pt. 2 I think phone booths not having video monitors is much less of a naive leap than flying cars and slave robots.

Well one of the things to keep in mind was that they used technology they already had cooking in their research labs. Hell I think video conferencing is as old as TV. It's different in a movie, although one thing that really sticks in my mind is the movie Predator 2 which was set in the 'futuristic' 1999 or something. All the computers can talk, but they sound like the sort of chopped-up remixed from recording style of computer 'speaking' that was actually possible in 1999, only that no on was really interested in it.

Another hilarious mis-prediction was a movie my friend told me about. It was made in 1950 and predicted that people would fly to the moon... within 300 years.
posted by delmoi at 6:52 AM on August 26, 2007

On the other hand, I think people have grown weary of the idea that picture phones will take over. We've been hearing that song and dance since the 1950s.

Actually, in the civilized world (i.e. not America) a lot of high-end cellphones have secondary cameras for video conferencing
posted by delmoi at 6:54 AM on August 26, 2007 [1 favorite]

Did anyone notice how the scenery and set design in this movie has a grimy, BladeRunner-esque look to it? Everything's drab, black and angular, especially that toll booth that guy drives through. ISTR reading somewhere that the team that created the ads were going for this effect, but I can't find it now. I did find out that the director of the ads went on to do Fight Club.
posted by tss at 7:04 AM on August 26, 2007

Another hilarious mis-prediction was a movie my friend told me about. It was made in 1950 and predicted that people would fly to the moon... within 300 years.

People don't realize what a crackpot idea space flight was in the '50s. I was mocked for my immersion in the subject (and had to read and interpret out loud a paragraph of Willy Ley's Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel when I was in third grade before a bitch of a school librarian would let me check it out); to my sensible relatives and teachers, it was as if I was interested in alchemy or something. I can still remember the tremendous sense of vindication when Armstrong landed on the moon.
posted by languagehat at 7:07 AM on August 26, 2007 [8 favorites]

We still have phone booths in Toronto. I used one last week... and was pissed to see that Bell has raised the rate to 50 cents. It was a quarter not 9 months ago.
posted by dobbs at 7:12 AM on August 26, 2007 [1 favorite]

A fax from the beach? I guess, but let's call it email.
Tucking in your baby from a phone booth? What's a phone booth?

Yeah, but in there defense, they had to communicate those ideas within a 30 second spot to a 1993 audience. You extrapolate from ideas they already understand, you don't introduce entirely new things. Even if they had a time machine and knew exactly what the future looked like, they still would have to explain it in 1993 terms.
posted by brevator at 7:19 AM on August 26, 2007

Old enough to remember .. 1993?

I thought that was a joke until I did the math and realized a 5 year old in 1993 is 19 years old today.

1993 was the breakthrough year the Internet first become available to the home user at affordable rates on a mass scale through a direct dialup TCP/IP connection (SLIP), I would call it the birth year of the consumer internet. 14.4/28.8 modems and 14" VGA monitors were standard, so in retrospect these devices in AT&T's adds, for the consumer, were very sci-fi looking. Now they are Best Buy material.
posted by stbalbach at 7:20 AM on August 26, 2007

I have a shitty car that breaks down all the time, and I don't own a cellphone. Believe me, there are still payphones to be found out there... outside gas stations and supermarkets are the best bet. I still find it annoying though that the banks of phones at places like airports-- airports, for crying out loud-- have been dwindling though.
posted by Hal Mumkin at 7:25 AM on August 26, 2007

A fax from the beach? I guess, but let's call it email.

Looked like the guy was using a tablet PC to me, too, which I don't think were even around at the time. And it could be faxed, it's just that email wasn't nearly as ubiquitous as it is now.
posted by malaprohibita at 7:29 AM on August 26, 2007

What I find really interesting is that these commercials were made just over a decade ago, and look how much they got wrong.

I had exactly the opposite response, I found it remarkable how prescient they were. Sure, the actual end applications (video in a phone booth, voice recognition to open doors) have not and will not come to fruition, but the technology is being used in other incarnations for the same purpose.
posted by prodigalsun at 7:37 AM on August 26, 2007

Looked like the guy was using a tablet PC to me, too, which I don't think were even around at the time.

You could have thought of it as a big Apple Newton MessagePad.
posted by grouse at 7:40 AM on August 26, 2007

Hell, I"m old enouth to remember The Bell Telephone Hour!
posted by paddbear at 7:48 AM on August 26, 2007 [1 favorite]

It really is interesting to see how much they got right, and I'm kinda amazed at all the "look at how much they got wrong" posts. The only thing they got wrong was video phones and voice activated door locks. And I could have a voice activated door lock if I really wanted one. Everything else was dead on.

Except, as was pointed out, for the fact that AT&T wasn't the people bringing it to us. Open standards, cheap hardware, and startup companies did most of it. I make video phone calls all the time, through the open internet and using Skype, AT&T still hasn't offered video phone service. My brother has a GPS device in his car that does exactly what the ad showed, and AT&T had squat to do with it. Etc. As far as I can tell all AT&T has done lately is try and kill the internet that lets most of the stuff they were talking about happen... Good show AT&T, good show.

DERAIL: As for pay phones, yeah, they're getting scarce in the USA, but they're all over the place in Tokyo. Its a matter of economics as it applies to population vs. available radio frequency. The population in Tokyo is so dense that if everyone talked on their cell phones no one would ever get a call through. So there's economic discouragement from actually making voice calls. My cell phone plan came with 30 minutes of talk time per month, and extra minutes were around 100 yen per minute (about $1). But for a mere 500 yen a month (about $5) I got unlimited text and email from my phone. You can't walk ten feet in Tokyo without finding a pay phone, and they're used all the time.
posted by sotonohito at 7:55 AM on August 26, 2007

In 1987, I used to eat lunch with my boss and he'd tell me all about how someday people would play games with virtual reality & stuff. He told me about e-mail, the internet, and how someday people would have phones small enough to fit in their pocket. I adored him so I totally humored him, but I clearly remember thinking, "Why the hell would I want a phone in my pocket? I don't want to be on call for people all the time. Who would want that?"

Anyhow, it will always bum me out that he died before he could see any of it actually happen. I still think about him whenever some new technology is invented... "Skid would've loved this." or "Bet Skid didn't see that one coming!" He was one of the most stellar people I've ever met. And now that I think about it, he was kind of a human version of those AT&T ads.
posted by miss lynnster at 8:01 AM on August 26, 2007 [2 favorites]

I thought that was a joke until I did the math and realized a 5 year old in 1993 is 19 years old today.

Yeah, that'd be me.

Very strange/interesting to see what "future technology" was at that point. It's very hard for me to remember life before (widespread use of) the internet, although I do remember I had to actually use a library for school projects.

Was the GPS device in the car only a concept or were people actively working on that? I have no idea when those came out for people to use in their cars.
posted by CitrusFreak12 at 8:27 AM on August 26, 2007

I hate that people still use faxes. I think they stick around because the operation is fairly simple (Unless you're me and you don't have long distance on your landline, so you have to use a phone card to fax anyone.

Faxes stick around because they're actually more universal than e-mail, and have the inherent function of printing. If you wanted to send diagrams or visuals of anything, e-mail requires making sure you have a image-capable client that accepts attachments, turning on your printer, and printing it out. A fax machine guarantees that you will be taking a document, and a copy of that document will be appearing in the receiver's machine. In that sense, they still serve a useful function- I mean, we still have Xerox machines in the era of scanners and high-res printers too.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 8:27 AM on August 26, 2007

so, if these commercials were made today what would they feature?
posted by brevator at 8:44 AM on August 26, 2007

"You Will."

I remember when this series ran, and I always heard that as sinister, a blood-chilling command that you would have no choice but to do things AT&T's way.
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 9:16 AM on August 26, 2007 [7 favorites]

sotonohito writes "As for pay phones, yeah, they're getting scarce in the USA, but they're all over the place in Tokyo...You can't walk ten feet in Tokyo without finding a pay phone, and they're used all the time."

Actually, that's not the case that I'm finding. Sure, we have way, way more than the US, but the number is dropping, fast, and has been for a while. On the odd occasion that I need to use a pay phone, I have to look for one now, whereas back when I first came to Tokyo, in 1994, you couldn't walk 10 feet without stumbling into one.

Witness the fact that you see absolutely no dealers of illegal phone cards now, when they used to be all up and down Shibuya's main street.
posted by bugbread at 9:24 AM on August 26, 2007

The shared Xerox^(TM) at my work is, and is used as, a scanner and a high-resolution network printer in addition to being a copier.

I guess we haven't quite crossed over into expecting everyone to have a reasonably modern client and a printer attached to it.
posted by porpoise at 9:25 AM on August 26, 2007

brevator - so, if these commercials were made today what would they feature?

You will:

- have an electronic communication device implanted directly in you (think of a cellphone inside of your head that you talk into subvocally and hear through bone conduction that you control by gross thought patterns like people playing computer games via an ekg hookup)

- contract a social disease with clinically quantifiable physical symptoms from a software virus that infects this device
posted by porpoise at 9:30 AM on August 26, 2007

Thanks, ItsaMario, for the link to AT&T's Connections video. I was a physicist at Bell Labs in 1993 when it came out. A senior executive used Connections as the introduction to his talk about AT&T's long term plans. When it was over he said, with the air of someone addressing an audience too smart for what he was trying to sell, "Well, of course this is all possible, but don't ask where we're going to get the bandwidth." That's why AT&T wasn't the company that brought us all these things.
posted by drdanger at 9:48 AM on August 26, 2007

bugbread I'll have to take your word for it regarding change. I was in Japan from September of '06 to February of '07, and coming from America of '06 the number of pay phones in Tokyo was staggering.
posted by sotonohito at 9:49 AM on August 26, 2007

There are plenty of public phones in places like airports, convention centers and large hotels, though I rarely seen a actual booth, and what's shown doesn't seem to be a full booth. Back in the wayback past booths closed and were nearly soundproof, because there was an assumption that one had a right to converse privately, and that anyone walking down the street would take it an an intrusion on their peace to hear the conversation of strangers.

And take your cell phone with you when you get off my lawn.
posted by tula at 9:49 AM on August 26, 2007

I wonder about the phone booth thing. Was AT&T so invested in that infrastructure that even they couldn't imagine doing without them in some form? Probably while they were furiously developing mobile phone, they were also seeing what kind of things they could do with phone booths. Imagine the day when the phone booth development team was let go.

OR, perhaps they used phone booths because, c'mon, who's going to believe tucking your child in from a cell phone?

1993: I had a dialup account on the National Capital Freenet and was happily gophering university library catalogues and chatting on IRC while waiting for the Web to be invented, which I hoped would happen in my lifetime.

1995 was a pleasant surprise. Well within the 300 year time limit.
posted by salishsea at 9:50 AM on August 26, 2007

Telco utopianism from 1962, courtesy of Bell Telephone: Century 21 Calling (riffed by Mike and the bots). Imagine, touch-tone dialing, call waiting... BEEPERS!
posted by letourneau at 9:59 AM on August 26, 2007

And can you imagine standing in line at an ATM while people ahead of you picked seats for a concert?
posted by tula at 10:00 AM on August 26, 2007 [3 favorites]

I remember being a kid and, having grown up on movies set in the "future", thinking the ads were a bunch of hooey.

It's good to be wrong.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:19 AM on August 26, 2007

Have you...spent half an hour on hold waiting to talk to a customer service representative to ask why they've suspended your account only to hear that your payment is 3 days late when you're staring at confirmation that they've been paid and cashed your payment 6 days earlier and that actually they owe you money?

Have you...received cell phones that prove unworkable on day 15 of your cell phone contract and then spend the next two years (minus fifteen days) fighting with Cingular to get some sort of resolution only to be told to lump it and like it?

YOU WILL!
posted by beelzbubba at 10:22 AM on August 26, 2007

Too Much Joy's song "You Will" is about AT&T. Excerpts:

Have you been faxed at the beach?
Have you felt our awesome reach?

Have you not felt incomplete?
Have you worshiped at our feet?

Have you ever wanted this?
Have you ever known such bliss?

You will - and you will not be scared

Seen our logo on the moon?
You will - and will you not be thrilled?
Tried to unpop a balloon?
You will - and if we say you will, YOU WILL
posted by candyland at 10:31 AM on August 26, 2007

Have you... subscribed to the best cell service provider only to learn that they're being taken over by the worst?

You will!
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:43 AM on August 26, 2007 [1 favorite]

ever gotten into a pointless argument with anonymous flametards - you will

ever smashed into a telephone pole at 50mph while trying to dial your cell phone - you will

ever wanted a cheap source of penis extension pills - you will

ever tried to spank it with one hand on the mouse while sitting in an aeron chair - you will
posted by vronsky at 11:12 AM on August 26, 2007 [2 favorites]

I do remember I had to actually use a library for school projects.

If you no longer have to use a library for school projects, your school is failing you.
posted by languagehat at 11:49 AM on August 26, 2007 [2 favorites]

So this outrageous device is a handheld computer that connects remotely to a massive ever-growing global user information computer database? Well I'll be."

the HHGTG would have shut down and the staff all gone for G&Ts before they'd ever have a fucking [citation needed], though.
posted by bonaldi at 12:41 PM on August 26, 2007

If you no longer have to use a library for school projects, your school is failing you.
That depends, especially on what level of school we're talking about. Things like Jstor are putting serious academic works online and if only for the grunt-level fact-finding, online is to the library what calculators were to the slide rule. It's not all user-generated bollocks out there.

I agree though that the library should come into play at some point, but its years are surely numbered.
posted by bonaldi at 12:47 PM on August 26, 2007

Not everything will always be online. Some school projects should require library use just so people will learn how to do research in a library.
posted by grouse at 12:49 PM on August 26, 2007

letourneau, that video was wonderful! Now I know what to do with my free time this week: MST3K on Google Video. Great link.

I count AT&T as 7 out of 10, which seems rather impressive, even with the caveats of their having not actually invented most any of these things.
posted by coolhappysteve at 1:06 PM on August 26, 2007

It's not that hard to figure out a catalogue, really. And digitisation is moving so quickly that soon actual paper will only be required for seriously esoteric stuff, and by that point librarians will hunt the stacks for you.

(I'm playing devil's argument a bit here, because boy I love me a good library, and dead trees aren't rotting that fast. But the difference between doing university-level coursework and research in 1995 and in 2005 was seriously eye-opening for me.)
posted by bonaldi at 1:08 PM on August 26, 2007

I was thinking more along the lines of secondary school projects. Also, I think you are overly optimistic about the ability of the general population, who can't even construct decent Google searches, to figure out a library catalog. Some familiarity would be helpful.
posted by grouse at 1:13 PM on August 26, 2007

Okay, so I still haven't purchased concert tickets from an ATM. But I have done so from my laptop at my kitchen table, and printed out my own tickets. I like that better.

Also, was the mom tucking in baby from the pay phone Jenna Elfman? Looked like her.
posted by dantsea at 1:21 PM on August 26, 2007

Sun's Starfire(1994) is another great video from that same time. Paleo-Future has it in several short clips.
posted by arialblack at 1:25 PM on August 26, 2007

Phone booths like this exists! They just aren't cool or very popular. They are often located in airports or train stations and they allow for a (not so) reasonable fee to use a voip phone, upload photos, surf the interweb, and even make a voicechat.
posted by darkripper at 2:29 PM on August 26, 2007

In 1995, I worked for the largest independent ISP in Oklahoma. When AT&T launched their Worldnet service, our reaction was "oh great, they're going to put all of the independent ISPs out of business". It didn't quite work out that way (Earthlink bought my by-then ex-employer five years later).

Twelve years later, most people have either their phone company (in my case, "at&t") or their cable company as their Internet provider... And guess who provides the service for my touch-screen phone with Internet access that has more processing power than the PC I had in '95?

The more things change, the more they stay the same.
posted by mrbill at 2:31 PM on August 26, 2007

Have you ever been in a cockpit before?
Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?
Have you ever seen a grown man naked?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 2:34 PM on August 26, 2007 [3 favorites]

grouse: They talk about that miscalculation in regards to packet switching, especially (I think) in Where Wizards Stay Up Late. (Required Reading, BTW.) Not only did the Big Boys think that Packet Switching wouldn't work, the one demonstration of it they saw was a total disaster, reinforcing their ideas. I mean, never mind it was because (i think) the hotel circuits couldn't handle all the stuff that was going on in that one conference room, but whatever.

But, let's be frank here, AT&T has been pretty obstructionist at every turn when it comes to telecommunications. I mean, it took a major lawsuit just to allow people to plug up non AT&T equipment to the phone lines. (Equipment such as modems.)

Though, in their defense, they were innovators in the cell phone industry. I do, however, find it somewhat disconcerting that the Wikipedia entry on AT&T doesn't have anything remotely resembling a real "history" under "history."
posted by absalom at 2:37 PM on August 26, 2007

Thanks tp those who answered my voiceover question!
posted by Zinger at 3:24 PM on August 26, 2007

dantsea -- I didn't see your post until I had already pulled up her IMDB URL for this comment, so I'd say that's independent verification.
posted by bpm140 at 3:59 PM on August 26, 2007

Yeah that was Jenna Elfman on the video pay phone with the baby. Right before she got into the air taxi to the space-shuttleport.
posted by wfc123 at 5:04 PM on August 26, 2007

Have you ever been in a cockpit before? You will.
Have you ever been in a Turkish prison? You will.
Have you ever seen a grown man naked? You will.
posted by kirkaracha at 5:31 PM on August 26, 2007 [1 favorite]

You know, the thought occurs that people ragging about the 'video phone' thing are just old and out of touch. Have you people thought about YouTube and video blogging and video chatting? They just don't call it a phone call, but it's the same basic thing... in some cases prerecorded and stored for posterity, and in some cases, not.

We old people don't do too much of this, being set in our ways, but the youngsters use this stuff routinely; the videophone world exists right now for them.
posted by Malor at 11:10 PM on August 26, 2007

Wow, I didn't realize those ads were from 1993 - for some reason I thought they were more recent.

They did get quite a few of those things right. The video-on-demand, the video conferencing from the computer, the borrowing books from thousands of miles away and the navigation system in the car are all around/able to be done now. They were very close on the paying the toll without stopping, too - we don't have the credit card swiper in our cars, but we do have I-Pass/E-ZPass/other electronic transponders. It's hard to remember that all those things that are now fairly common have not been around all that long.
posted by SisterHavana at 11:58 PM on August 26, 2007