AT&T vision video from 1961

Remember AT&T's "You Will" campaign from the early 1990s? Here's its predecessor, from 1961. Starring:

* The wireless Bellboy Pager, which was introduced commercially in 1962
* The Data-phone, which was supposed to revolutionize business communications
* The videophone—shown as a credit-card-reading vertical two-way television
* The card-reading phone or automatic dialer, which would dial a number from small plastic punch cards, introduced in 1961
* Oh, and package delivery via rocket (which had just been tested in 1959).

"AT&T Archives: Seeing the Digital Future (1961)"

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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http://twitter.com/WpgCameraMan Rock Hardwood

Also known as “AT&T’s LSD Adventure”
- Nicky G
  
  I’m 30 seconds in and having flashbacks, does it get less insane???
- jellyfishattack
  
  Wow, tripy! I especially loved the phone punch card dialer – so teletype! I also loved that they wrote AT & T in full, lest we forget they were American Telephone & Telegraph!
http://orbitnet.com JIMWICh

If there’s not already a fashion house named “Howards Of Hong Kong,” there totally needs to be.
InclinedPlane

Totally worth watching just for the line “I work my pants to the bone!”
- Preston Sturges
  
  Why is he using a Princess phone?
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    Well, there’s your subtext. I just came to say the same thing.
mtdna

I kept waiting for a shot of Don Draper making out with Peggy Olson.
folkclarinet

First thought: Was that Roger from Mad Men at the first scene with 5 guys???

Second thought: Larry Tate is on screen around 13:40. :)
jarmstrong

Man, did that start off like some of Ken Nordine’s word jazz or what?
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/ Stefan Jones
  
  . . . word jazz! . . .
anonymous37

Anyone here remember the song “You Will” by Too Much Joy? It’s their somewhat terrified take on AT&T’s promise of how new technology will change our lives (lyrics here: http://www.toomuchjoy.com/index.php/lyrics/lyrics-finally/ ).

Plus, as a Stanford graduate, I enjoyed the references to Lake Lagunita, the crappy lake which remained unfilled 3 of the 4 years I was there due to drought.
Frank Diekman

What I want to know is – how do you get porn on these things?
- Preston Sturges
  
  It was a big improvement over Morse code eroticism.
http://thisisonlya.blogspot.com robcat2075

Those screeching electronic bleeps that open it were still being taught as the sort of thing serious composers should be composing when I went to college in the 80′s
Frank Diekman

8:15 Plastic punch card dialing – a whole five percent faster than hand dialing!

9:30 A pager that’s a small as six decks of cards? That sumbitch is MINE now!
- David Kopelman
  
  That pager was epic! And all it could do was beep. I’m thinking that if I went back in time and showed them my Samsung Captivate, their effing heads would explode, or they’d worship me as a god.
baseline

I love the musicality of the touch-tone sequence generated by the punch-card reader between 7:10 and 7:23.

Also, I’m almost positive that the gentleman who comes in and gives an order at the 8-minute mark is Mason Adams.
baseline

Also, the faux Frenchman at 11:30 must not be a serious dart player if he has such a lovely white vase so close to his dartboard on the mantel.
- jarmstrong
  
  Either that or he may be a very serious dart player who just hates bowling pins.
- jellyfishattack
  
  You’d think the faux Frenchman could’ve done better with his accent: it sounds rather German at the end of one line and like High School French the rest of the time – also, you’d think a Frenchman would write French words using the requisite accents… I guess they weren’t terribly concerned with linguistic accuracy in the video.
millie fink

The future sure looks scary.

(Seconded on “I work my pants to the bone”! Surely some sort of Freudian bonerism.)
millie fink

“Can my machine talk to your machine?”

Wasn’t that the title of a Kraftwerk song?
http://www.peterbagge.com/ Buddy Bradley

heh love how the guy at the restaurant just pockets the pager! nice touch.

also, interesting how most of the users of the new technologies are women.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_OAUXAA362EXWLYVMPJOKLFB5JQ Incipient Madness

I loved the handwriting recognition on the French guy’s pate order , and the ICBM pate delivery from Paris.

And someone really does need to sample this for a techno song.
hypnosifl

This reminds me of the 1967 short film 1999 A.D., which predicted (among other things) online shopping and microwave ovens…
- Mark Dow
  
  Starts off slow, but the last half is brilliant — complete with plausible faked moon landing. “3 wrong: you flunk”.
http://twitter.com/ErnestValdemar Ernest Valdemar

It’s kind of amazing how much human interaction is still required, even in The Future. Why wasn’t the order for pate beauf just routed to the appropriate suppliers automatically? Imagination FAIL.

What I remember about the You Will campaign was that, within a year of the start of that campaign, I was sitting on the front porch of a 19th c. house in a small town in Indiana, writing up documentation for an Indigo IRIX acoustical analysis software package on an Mac notebook, before dialing in toll-free to a team meeting that spanned three continents. The ads were, if anything, too conservative.
IronEdithKidd

I know the “you will” ads were voiced by Tom Seleck, but we made fun of them by reciting the copy in the voice of Groundskeeper Willie. Made everything sound more ominous. BTW – I still want to check out my entire cart of groceries without actually taking the stuff out of the cart. And no, a cashier with a hand scanner will not suffice.