Thursday, April 19, 2007

Boing Boing: AT&T's vision for the Internet in 1993:

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!