So the past few days I’ve been poking around in the Youtube channel “At&t Tech Channel”. Within that is the “At&t Archive” that hosts tons of old videos from At&t, Bell Labs and MA Bell. These videos are awesome for a variety of reasons; but other than the retro-futurism of them, it shows just how much MA Bell either “thought” or “was” the technology provider of the people back then. (At least until the Carterfone Decision)
It’s really interesting to see the concept videos showing paging for farms, how the “central office” was obsolete and going away, leading to *gasp* DIALING (and later push-button dialing), amongst other things.
It’s also interesting how a handful of these videos are somewhat local to the PA/NJ area, as the NJ Bell labs building was a substantial part of them back then, and (if I’m not mistaken) where a number of major innovations, including the invention of the transistor happened.
If you’re nerdy like me and need a new time waster, definitely check out this channel!
At&t Tech Channel (and archive): https://www.youtube.com/user/ATTTechChannel