man, i've been making "the company that'll bring it to you" jokes for 13 years now, and i always wonder whether anyone will get it. now you will!

boingboing links to andrew sullivan, who comments on these old at&t ads. one of sully's readers (presumably the person who uploaded the video) notes the irony that, while almost all of these technologies have since come to life, at&t didn't bring us any of them. boingboing's cory has a different take: "What they missed was that for all the normalcy that the Internet could enable, it would be much, much better at enabling deviance -- all the behaviors that were suppressed by society, or impossible to engage in given social constraints."¶

That's true that "AT&T" did not bring it to everyone, but when these commercials were made they owned Bell Labs, later spun off to Lucent Technologies, did bring many of those things to everyone. ¶