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Subject: Boing Boing: AT&T's vision for the Internet in 1993
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Wednesday, April 18, 2007
AT&T's vision for the Internet in 1993
[attconnections.jpg] The Paleo-Future blog has just concluded a
six-part video series based AT&T's 1993 video "Connections: AT&T's
Vision of the Future." This is an early-Internet-era promotional for
AT&T's futuristic, net-based services, and is hilariously wrong in
really interesting ways. Futurism always tells you more about the
superstitions and ambitions of the era in which it was written than it
does about the actual future. In this cast, AT&T conceives of the
Internet as something profoundly organized and polished, something that
works a lot more like AOL than the net as we know it. Plus, lots of
virtual reality: always the virtual reality, back in 1993! (Oh, and
video-phones!) Link
Update: Mike Robins, a retired AT&T/Bell employee sez, "At this point
in time, AT&T was talking about THEIR network. All of these services
and future ideas were a vision to provide these services to anyone
using their telephone network. In 1993 there was even a large thrust
from the executives to deny that the Internet would ever be something
useful to AT&T. We were always discouraged from even using the word
(Internet) when making presentations. If we used the word Internet,
whatever we were talking about would get an immediate negative
connotation. We did manage to use the word Intranet, and that meant
that it could be something 'controlled' and 'managed' for businesses,
unlike the 'wild', 'uncontrolled', 'insecure', and 'unreliable'
Internet."
posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:19:44 AM permalink | Other blogs'
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