Correction. AT&T isn’t predicting the future of the Internet here, they’re predicting the future of the “Information Super Highway” as they expected it would be.
In the early 1990s the large technology and telecom companies poured millions of dollars into their vision of what the “Information Super Highway” would bring, once faster networks were widely available.
But that was not the Internet, which at the time was seen as too technical and geeky to be of wide use. Their vision was a closed network on which they would control all of the technology.
Meanwhile, kids in midwestern university basements were working to make the Internet more accessible and usable by regular people, with a belief that open standards and protocols were the future, and that led to the World Wide Web as we know it today.
Those kids clobbered those large telecom companies, forced Microsoft to completely change course, and produced the dot-com boom of the late 90s.
That’s why these ads seem so ridiculous.
