I worked at AT&T / Bell Labs when those commercials were flooding every show on TV.
Bell Labs was upset because AT&T made those commercials without consulting us. A PR company thought up all the ideas. We had zero projects internally working on such products.
That's why those products came from EZPass, not AT&T; Skype, not AT&T; Apple iPad, not AT&T.
Even thought it wasn't AT&T that brought those things to market, nearly all of them do exist today. It is a beautiful thing. I feel lucky to be living in what my co-workers call 'The freakin Buck-Rogers-would-be-jealous future'.
Tom
PS. Oh, and the one where they guy has a Dick Tracy-style video-phone on his watch? Well, soon after AT&T bought McCaw Cellular my friends in the cellular phone communications research area were asked to work up an explanation of why such a thing can't exist and isn't likely to exist any time soon. It turns out that after AT&T bought McCaw they (McCaw) was very unhappy to learn that the wrist-phone was a figment of a marketing person's imagination and not something actually being developed at Bell Labs. Ooops. I hope they didn't let themselves get bought by AT&T just because they thought we had that product in the wings.
Tom:
I was also at the Labs (Research @ MH) when these spots
were made.
We were consulted by the PR people before they were shot.
As far as I know, most "predictions" in those spots were
based on real technologies and demos that were running in
the Labs at that time. My dept was directly responsible
for two of them.
I do not recall the Dick Tracy watch but the
projects behind the books on-line, video-on-demand and
"EZ Pass" were being done at HO and MH.
Others were products or concepts in the pipeline
(e.g. fax from a tablet -- remember GO/EO?,
tickets from a cash machine -- NCR ATMs).
Some things shown were straight line
extrapolations from core technologies that had existed
in the Labs for some time (e.g. driving across the country
without needing a map, video telephony, packet
voice/video, etc.)
Much of the really interesting work from Research at the
Labs never made it into real products from AT&T
due to various political, business and regulatory issues.
Many things later got "reinvented" by other firms
that were better able to capitalize on the innovation.
It has been said that any company that can afford an
organization like Bell Labs Research will ignore it.
That was definitely the case for Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc.
> That's why those products came from EZPass, not AT&T; Skype, not AT&T; Apple iPad, not AT&T.
Fascinating explanation. I never understood the relationships between most of the ideas in those commercials and AT&T. It's actually awesome to see these commercials again and realize how many far fetched ideas have come true. I remember thinking that most of the things in the commercial were nonsense!
Looking back it's more interesting how little AT&T has had to do with any of those things. I wonder how influential these commercials were on the engineers today who actually built those things (EZPass, Skype, iPad) or are the presence of these technologies an inevitable extension of the direction technology was going to go anyway?
I was at a distance learning software company that had AT&T as a client. I always wondered if there was a connection to the commercial. We were connecting classrooms with video and shared multimedia content. I even made a "Jazz" course but I think it was later.
Around 1998, "The Internet" changed our market so we rushed to rewrite the software to work on it. Up until that point, it wasn't really on our radar.
Bell Labs was upset because AT&T made those commercials without consulting us. A PR company thought up all the ideas. We had zero projects internally working on such products.
That's why those products came from EZPass, not AT&T; Skype, not AT&T; Apple iPad, not AT&T.
Even thought it wasn't AT&T that brought those things to market, nearly all of them do exist today. It is a beautiful thing. I feel lucky to be living in what my co-workers call 'The freakin Buck-Rogers-would-be-jealous future'.
Tom
PS. Oh, and the one where they guy has a Dick Tracy-style video-phone on his watch? Well, soon after AT&T bought McCaw Cellular my friends in the cellular phone communications research area were asked to work up an explanation of why such a thing can't exist and isn't likely to exist any time soon. It turns out that after AT&T bought McCaw they (McCaw) was very unhappy to learn that the wrist-phone was a figment of a marketing person's imagination and not something actually being developed at Bell Labs. Ooops. I hope they didn't let themselves get bought by AT&T just because they thought we had that product in the wings.