Paleofuturism
Monday, May 4th, 2009 | commentary
It’s interesting to look back at old visions for the future and compare them against how things really turned out.
Like these 1993 “You Will” commercials from AT&T that includes a glance at something resembling an EO.
I was at GO Corp at the time and it was exciting to see something like what we were doing be exposed to the mainstream.
The field is called w PS: They were wrong in their prognostication about me sending a fax from the beach.
Wikipedia calls it retro-futurism. Matt Novak has a whole blog devoted to the cause he calls Paleo-Future. This site is a great resource for those of us interested in the nature of envisioning future products. What did our predecessors get right and wrong? What are the patterns of failure that we can apply to our predictions today?
PS: AT&T was wrong in their prognostication about me sending a fax from the beach.
1 Comment to Paleofuturism
aww man, i totally remember those commercials, magnum PI was the voice over! 
and at&t still had a respectable logo.
yeah, funny how some of the things were still unnecessarily complex, like having to slide your credit card through the slot while driving, or that the fax sending wasn’t just an email being sent. i’m sure they will say the same about our videos a decade from now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dact-1Tdgz0
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May 7, 2009