I was just thinking about those ads last week, particularly the one where the car speeds through the tollbooth. My friends and I were like “dude, that’s going to be the coolest!!”
EZ-Pass. yawn.
And I’m pretty sure AT&T didn’t have anything to do with that one.
AT&T had everything to do with those things… well, sort of. They may not have brought those end-user products to market, but it was their inventions and innovations that allowed for the development of those products. Perhaps it’s a bit of hindsight on my part, but I don’t see those ads as claiming that you’ll have an AT&T EZ-Pass or AT&T email, but rather that due to their products, inventions, and services, these things are known to be in development in 1993 and you should see them in the near future.
The only thing that was wrong in the ads were some miscalculations of marketplace desires (videophones being the big one, IMO) and maybe how AT&T’s stuff would be used to make those things happen.
You know, sometimes YouTube works here at the office, and sometimes it doesn’t. I can’t see the video. Waah.
As far as the voice command thing goes, I’d much rather be able to control things with my cell phone via Bluetooth.
I tells ya, YouTube on my work computer does whatever it wants. I went back, clicked on the same link in the OP, and the video played. I thought I didn’t have such-and-such software, or whatever it said I was missing. Cool stuff. Too bad ATT/Cingular is balls.
Yeah, that’s cool, but I wish it’d go a step further and have systems set up like they have in Japan where they can pay for stuff with their cell phones.
Have I ever sent someone a what from the beach?
Have I ever tucked my baby in from a what?
So does anyone actually remember 1993? I don’t. Okay, yes, I remember that the year existed, and I remember being alive during it, but I can’t put any of this in context. The years just kind of all blend together for me. I vaguely remember these commercials, and geeking out with my sister about how cool it would be to have picture/video phones, but I can’t remember if that was because we were nerds, or because the technology seemed so far-fetched. How far off were we from all of this stuff a decade and a half ago?
Wow, was that the actor who played Magnum PI doing the voice over?
Mean Old Lady, see 1993. It was the year Waco Texas became famous. Pentium chips were new, and all my friends had little “pentium inside” logo-stickers on their toilet tanks. I’d just gotten my first job at which I had regular email and internet access.
You know, I read through that, and it all seems like stuff that happened six weeks ago. Except Rodney King testifying. I remember the riots were just one year prior (I lived in South Central LA at the time… eek!), and that seems like forever ago. Your post just added a little context as well when you say it was the year when you first had a job with regular e-mail and internet access. I owned my first home computer in 1994, so I guess we were a little off from GPS in cars, and reading books online.
Where does time go? And people say it only goes faster as you get older! At this rate, I’ll be dead in five days.
When you’re over the hill, you pick up speed. I’m on the luge to hell. 
The problem with the video phone concept is that nobody wants to do their hair and makeup every time they call someone. If I want to call my grandma, I can do so sitting at my desk naked and pouring Sue-Bee honey all over my chest. If I had a video phone, I’d have to put clothes on and such.
And imagine the inconvenience of being called unexpectedly with a video phone. Maybe it’s your boss and you look like crap, or you’re wearing a bondage/gimp mask because you and the missus were engaging in some maritals.
Audio communication is still so prevalent because it’s not much of an intrusion into our lives. Unless there’s a porno on in the background, it’s difficult to be embarrassed by how you’ll sound over the phone, but it’s very difficult to be embarrassed by how you or your environment looks.
And the “I’m home” door lock is ridiculous. A home security system that can be defeated with a cassette recorder is not a security system at all. And anyway, AT&T wouldn’t have anything to do with it. Well, they might have, but they got out of the voice recognition game a while ago as other people do it better.
My brother’s Palm Pilot could send faxes. You could connect a modem and then a phone cord. Don’t think it ever worked. If you have a digitized document, perhaps there would be a way to send that digitized document to the recipient’s screen and not a clunky printer on his desk…
1993 was the year I quit my job for the sake of my wife’s career, moved out of South Carolina, bought my first PC, and started working for a bank. I remember it pretty well, actually.
It worked great in Die Hard on a Boat (or maybe it was Die Hard on a Train)!
It was the train one, and it was a Newton.
It wasn’t my first job, just my first job with real access. I had a home computer much earlier, as my dad was an early adopter and I used it for school. Ini my previous job I had a fancy fax machine that would store the faxes in memory and send them at programmed times. Pretty high-tech in 1993.
The movie list for 1993 put it into a greater social context for me, as now I remember seeing those movies, and who I saw them with. I saw Demolition Man with a guy I can’t (now) believe I dated for a year. I met him through alt.talk.bizarre.
Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List came out 16 years ago?! Holy crap.
That’s what I meant, and what I thought I said with “it was the year when you first had a job with regular e-mail and internet access.” I suppose I could have been unclear; it’s happened before. It just made me remember that the entire universe wasn’t online in those days, and then I recalled that I hadn’t owned a computer at all until 1994. Of course there are the ultra techs who have been online since Al Gore invented the internets, but I’m just one of those people who kind of moves along with technology, and am never before it. If I didn’t have a computer at all until 1994, I guess 1993 was a ways off from picture phones and reading books online. It just all seems so… recent.