[Jeff @ Dec 6th 2006 11:19PM]

These were actually a series of commercials that ran on regular old TV - just to clarify that fact, as the way the submission is worded makes it sound as if this is some archeological artifact that was recently "unearthed" from some secret AT&T vault. This was their early 90's marketing campaign - I saw all of these ads, as I'm sure a lot of other people here did.

The thing is, I don't believe any of these technologies were original ideas even back then. I mean this is not ancient history we're talking about here; this was the 90's. GPS existed, as did touch-screens (heck, touch-screen PDA's were already popular), and pretty much everything here was at least already being talked about. I don't remember thinking any of the things in these ads was particularly noteworthy or outlandish, although I do remember thinking it would be cool if at least a few of these ideas really did hit the mainstream.

And of course, like a modern-day Nostradamus, this campaign had just as many misses as hits. I don't know anybody that "tucks their baby in from a phone booth", for example. Or opens their door with the sound of their voice. Or carries their medical history in their wallet. In fact, all of these are now pretty horrifying ideas, as security-conscious as we've all become these days. They're all possible ideas as AT&T shows them, but there are pretty compelling reasons why we don't use them.

I also read part of the story at the "read" link, which is just inaccurate. It states, for one thing, that web browsers were "a year or two away" in 1993. In fact, NCSA Mosaic was released in February of 1993 and it was not even the first browser. AT&T's inspiration for that idea here is pretty obvious. All of these ideas no doubt have similar lineages. They were fairly new, but nothing most nerds of the day hadn't already heard of, or even that magazines like Popular Science weren't already heavily hyping.