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!)
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."
