[AnOscelot]

I'm especially interested in how deeply embedded phone booths were to people who should have thought past them. A lot of SF / futurist stuff from the 60s to early 90s thought people would still be tied to fixed locations for telephone and network access.

I've always wondered why that was, especially when some form of mobile phones have been around since the 80's, or even earlier with very expensive car radios which could tap into the phone network. I guess the phone booth was such a fixture of the landscape that no one could imagine a world without them.

[danbruc]

Especially given, as a look at the history of mobile phones [1] reveals, that AT&T pioneered commercial mobile phone calls in 1949, 45 years before this ad campaign. The idea of videotelephony came up in 1878 and Germany had an experimental public video telephone service in 1936, AT&T had the Picturephone in 1964. [2] Add to this that mobile audio and video calls have been depicted in science fiction for a long time.

Whatever made them pick land line phones over mobile phones for video calls, it probably was more like an oversight or they estimated a longer time horizon for widespread adoption, it certainly was nothing they could not have imagined. Maybe it was even something trivial like easier visualization in the ad.

Thinking about this also reminded me of the 2005 movie »The Island« [3] which also feature video call telephone booths and I have this vague feeling that [video call] telephone booths are generally quite common in science fiction movies. But that might just be because you don't have to explain how someone obtained a mobile phone after he just escaped a situation where he lost all personal items.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_videotelephony

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film)

[skybrian]

At the time even wired networks couldn't easily carry video, let alone wireless. Video was thought to require enormous bandwidth, and this wasn't far wrong; it's a significant percentage of Internet traffic even today.

So it wasn't implausible that video calls would come first to wired networks and be limited to them for quite a while. The early "Internet Superhighway" hype was all about getting broadband in people's homes for delivering video.

[code_duck]

People who have never had an interest in computers for entertainment, but significant interest in watching TV, have historically assumed that advances in the internet would mean some sort of super TV. I suppose this has happened, in the form of Netflix.

[shuntress]

I find the most interesting aspect of this observation to be the notion that we have a similar present-day blind spot and the associated exercise in predicting what is that blind spot(s).

[AnOscelot]

You're correct. That's the fun part. What's especially fun is that the blind spot is often something which has already been developed, and didn't sell well in its first iteration, or is common in prototypes and SF / futurist stuff but no one thought it would ever be widely available.

[lstamour]

Having to use a certain physical device to interact with software? ;-)