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defrogFUN FACT: In 1983, the future of communications looked like this.
It’s funny to watch with hindsight, in the sense that videotext never took off as a service (except in France, where Minitel was so popular that it took them until this past June to turn it off, and it still had over 600,000 subscribers at the time).
But really, most of the services AT&T pitches here have actually become reality almost 30 years later. So in that sense AT&T was arguably ahead of its time.
All it really got wrong – like most monopoly telephone companies in the world at the time – was the idea that customers would see value in a closed system where even the terminals were made and sold by the same company that sold you the service. Because that’s how it was done back then.
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This is dF
It’s funny to watch with hindsight, in the sense that videotext never took off as a service (except in France, where Minitel was so popular that it took them until this past June to turn it off, and it still had over 600,000 subscribers at the time).
But really, most of the services AT&T pitches here have actually become reality almost 30 years later. So in that sense AT&T was arguably ahead of its time.
All it really got wrong – like most monopoly telephone companies in the world at the time – was the idea that customers would see value in a closed system where even the terminals were made and sold by the same company that sold you the service. Because that’s how it was done back then.
Offline,
This is dF
