Welcome to AT&T's Tomorrowland, a world where ridiculously good-looking people are perpetually connected to each other through gadgets and apps hooked up to the web. It's a fantasyland created by the giant telephone company two decades ago, in a series of amazingly prescient TV ads (shown above).
In AT&T's tomorrowland, TVs would be far more than your gateway to Full House and Murphy Brown. They'd let you tap experts for help for just about anything. You wouldn't have to stuff a clunky video camera into a teddy bear to keep a watchful eye on your home and loved ones. There’d be an app for that. Getting lost behind the wheel would be a quaint anachronism. Cars would be equipped with nav systems to get you where you needed to go. Working from the beach would be easy with tablets and laptops, and if you didn't speak your colleague's language, a computer would translate it for you in real-time. Virtual assistants would be at your beck and call.
It all sounded so enticing. In fact, it all sounds a lot like life today.
But back in the early 90s, these ideas seemed ripped from the pages of an Isaac Asimov novel. The internet was just getting started. Going online required waiting through the cacophonous hissing of a dial-up modem, and the time it took to download a video -- if your computer could even play one -- rivaled the length of Lord of the Rings.
For the most part, the telecom giant's predictions about what it would be like to live in the age of the internet were spot-on. Even if you don't have a bougie car with a built-in navigation system, your smartphone is always there to give you turn-by-turn directions. Services like Hulu and HBO Go let us stream movies and TV shows on demand, 24/7. Companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google are using artificial intelligence to build smart personal assistants, and telecommuting is now en vogue seemingly everywhere but Yahoo.
The ads would be completely amazing if they didn't continually mis-predict that all of this cool stuff would be invented by AT&T instead of Netflix, Dropcam, Coursera, Google and Amazon.
Twenty years on, there are things the world of big tech still hasn’t quite cracked like the smartwatch, voice-activated locks, and smart supermarkets. Electronic medical records still suck, and ATMs that spit out driver’s licenses haven’t come to pass yet. But who knows, maybe a few decades from now we won’t need them at all if autonomous cars take over our streets. The downside: flirting with that hot girl or guy in line won’t be an option.
Still, it's worth looking back at the seven ads that foretold everything. Enjoy.
