1977 film highlights a new Bell Labs-developed system for building advertisements to publish in the Yellow Pages. While very crude by today’s Photoshop/Illustrator/Fireworks/whatever standard, the scanner + dynamic design system was a huge leap forward for workers used to setting their own type and photos.
This is published in honor of the venerable Yellow Pages, which were sold to Cerberus Capital this week.
View Link [youtube.com]
How do you sell phones and answering machines, circa 1985? Easy – employ a golden-voiced announcer, and demonstrate each amazing product with a cheesy, stereotype-laden, poorly-acted vignette that would fit right in with the era’s worst sitcoms. Our protagonists include a lothario thwarted by an answering machine, a ridiculous pizza maker saved by a speakerphone call from his Mama, and a bathing-suit-clad housewife who doesn’t have to interrupt pool time thanks to her new cordless phone (complete with an approximately 4 foot long antenna). Other players help to paint a picture of a wide range of communications products that made that mid-80s lifestyle just a bit more glamorous.
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If you joined AT&T in the late 1980s, this gem greeted you on orientation day. Two fine performers portraying the legendary Alexander Graham Bell and Theodore Vail recount the company’s founding, growth, and, in the final third, the break-up of the Company. The film puts a smiley face on events that it clearly recounts with disdain, focusing on how AT&T will move forward in the Information Age. Lots of great video effects and clips from classic commercials are sprinkled liberally throughout.
View Link [youtube.com]
These five minutes of pure awesome are an ad for AT&T’s Viewtron, a proto-AOL service that brought all the wonders of online shopping, banking and learning to your home TV in 1983. Using the phone lines and a snazzy Sceptre wireless keyboard, Viewtron offered everything the average person needed to cut through all the noise and information overload that plagued the early 80s consumer.
View Link [youtube.com]
“The Unix System,” a 1982 film produced by Bell Labs, is a highlight reel of UNIX’s key features, presented by many of the people who were essential to the development of UNIX. From Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (who also created the C programming language), to Brain Kernighan and Alfred Aho, the lineup of speakers is akin to a video showing basketball tips from Jordan, Bird, Magic and Ewing. For anyone who has ever done any sort of computer programming, it’s a must-watch.
View Link [youtube.com]
This series of PSAs on Computer Security were played for Bell System executives at an early 1990s company conference. They paint a pretty good picture of the new climate of concern that had emerged around protecting data networks, but the most interesting aspect is their relevance today. Switch out a couple of minor details, and the computer security topics that were important 2 decades ago are what we’re still talking about now: credit card fraud, industrial espionage, weak passwords, and more.
View Link [techchannel.att.com]
This corporate news piece from the opening of “Spaceship Earth” has plenty to offer the casual to semi-rabid technology fan who is also partial to World’s Fair-esque exhibits about the FUTURE! Great footage of “Spaceship Earth’s” exhibits abound, and the film also features other highlights of EPCOT, including Exxon’s “Universe of Energy,” replete with animatronic dinosaurs.
View Link [techchannel.att.com]
This film features a wide variety of designer phones that one could have purchased from AT&T in the late 1970s. Sporting names like the “Coquette,” “Celebrity,” and “Antique Gold,” there was a model for everyone, from the budget-monded to the big spender (the Anitque Gold cost $400 in 2012 dollars!)
Keep an eye out for the “Exeter,” a faux-snakeskin/pleather-clad beauty that must have been huge with the cucumber sandwich crowd. Take it all in, and then sigh wistfully as you imagine how amazing it would be if phone designers made gems like this today.
View Link [techchannel.att.com]
In this second recently unearthed Jim Henson film, a plucky protagonist named “Charlie Magnetico” struggles to keep his small electronics business afloat despite the “perils” of inadequate data communications.
His continuing struggles result in many explosions, and the narrator, which is Henson’s robot puppet, takes dispassionate glee in the travails of poor Charlie.
Charlie, and Charlie’s mother, are played by Henson’s first employee and collaborator, Jerry Juhl.
View Link [techchannel.att.com]
This film, unearthed from the AT&T Archives, was created by Jim Henson for a 1963 Bell Data Communications Seminar. We’re not 100% sure if it was ever shown to the public, but we’re guessing the seminar attendees didn’t expect to see a film featuring a murderous, farting robot preach its superiority to humans. Either way, it’s a splendid 3 minutes.
Proof on Henson’s original creation of the robot can be found at the Henson Archives: http://www.henson.com/jimsredbook/2011/08/31/8311972/
View Link [techchannel.att.com]
A short, but serious history-documentary about sound in film, and how developments and inventions from the Bell System made it possible.
Among the milestone inventions included, and profiled are the audion tube amplifier, the condenser microphone, and the Vitaphone film sound system.
The film consists mostly of older clips and stills, including rare snippets of the first feature sound film shown in public, Don Juan, starring John Barrymore, from 1926.
Listen to This also includes pieces from other early talking films, including:
View Link [techchannel.att.com]
Tough guy Steve McQueen made his film debut not as a grizzled soldier, nor a dashing leading man, but as a dorky sailor “Freddy” in a Bell System Film that espoused the virtues of a multiple phone household.
View Link [youtube.com]
This 1970s film uses, well, distinctly 70s motifs to teach children about the telephone. It’s a classic among the education films set, and this version is in much better condition than other copies you may find around the web. Consider it the Criterion collection version of a fascinating, yet slightly disturbing, education film.
View Link [techchannel.att.com]
This late-70s film, distributed to Bell System employees, aims to teach phone company leadfoots about the value of saving gas. It features an enlightened supervisor who, with the assistance of a real-time miles per gallon meter, teaches his wayward employee the value of smart driving. Techniques explored include:
Please ignore the irony that the sedan that they’re cruising around in achieves a “typical” 12 MPG while cruising around town. It was the 70s, after all.
View Link [youtube.com]
Real-life Mad Man Saul Bass put together this incredible video to pitch Bell System executives on his ideas for new logos, uniforms, vehicle, building, and telephone booth designs. It’s a glorious hodepodge of 60s music and fashion, complete with a prelude that shows how badly the Bell System looked to the current generation.
View Link [techchannel.att.com]
This semi-prescient-but-not-in-the-way-you’d-think-it video from the late 1960s highlights the current abilities of lasers (including tattoo removal via a device that looks to be straight out of Gears of War), and gives BOLD PREDICTIONS for the decades ahead.
These predictions include using your phone as a calculator and to receive stock quotes and video calls, but sadly for the planet, the video fails to mention any nascent shark- or cat-based laser applications.
View Link [techchannel.att.com]
When the Bell System wanted to convince theater owners that there was great potential in talking pictures, they teamed with legendary cartoonist Max Fleischer to create “Finding His Voice,” the first cartoon to feature voice and music. The rudimentary yet delightful animation explained how the Vitaphone system worked, showing theater owners what to expect if they were to buy in to the world of “talkies.”
View Link [techchannel.att.com]
“Seconds for Survival” tells the story of the Bell System’s contribution to Cold War-era defense communications. From far-flung radar stations to domestic phone networks that could route around disastrous assaults, this film uses narrator Raymond Massey and a score worthy of John Williams to explain how, in the end, the Bell System may just save us all.
View Link [techchannel.att.com]
In “Mr. Digit and the Battle of Bubbling Brook,” an animated Professor named Mr. Digit explains to a couple why they’re losing their “Bubbling Brook 3-2468″ phone number in favor of a boring 7 digit number. The couple, played by popular-at-the-time duo Peg Lynch and Alan Bunce, are dubious at first, but succumb to the charms of Mr. Digit and learn to love their new number.
We’re still looking for a version of this video where AT&T explains to pissed-off New Yorkers why they’re losing their 212 area codes.
View Link [techchannel.att.com]
The wonderfully British Dr. C. G. B. Garrett of Bell Laboratories stars in “Principles of the Optical Maser,” a 1963 film about how lasers and masers work. Like most of the “How Stuff Works” films from Bell Labs, the actual meat of his explanation holds up pretty well today, even if the simple animation and beatnik tunes do not.
View Link [techchannel.att.com]
In the mid 1950s, switchboards were giving way to self-dialed phones. AT&T, playing the role of the geeky kid who teaches Mom how to use the new computer, created this film to show people how they would make their own telephone connections using a rotary dial.
Lessons taught in this film, among others, include “Wait for the Dial Tone,” and “The Difference Between Ringing and Busy Signals.”
View Link [techchannel.att.com]
This 1977 film gushes over the potential for lasers as future vectors of communication. It has all the requirements of a 1970s educational film, including but not limited to a period re-enactment of Alexander Graham Bell communicating via sunlight, an extended stream-of-consciousness technology montage, and a soundtrack that could easily have served as the inspiration for the original Tron.
View Link [youtube.com]
In a quest to find a better way to power the phone network in the 1950s, Bell Labs began work on harnessing the power of the sun. In 1956, the Labs produced “The Bell Solar Battery,” a film that chronicles the creation of early green technology, before anyone ever thought of being green at all.
View Link [techchannel.att.com]
The good folks at Atari have unleashed Atari’s Classics, an iOS app that plays 100 classic arcade and Atari 2600 games. You get Pong for free, but the rest, including my all-time favorite Yars Revenge, are available in $.99 4-packs or $15 for all 100.
View Link [itunes.apple.com]
In 1927, Dave and the legendary Max Fleischer created “That Little Big Fellow,” one of the first films to use rotoscoping, which is a technique for merging live action and animation. The silent film follows the adventures of “Current,” an animated character who escapes from his artists and goes to work for the phone company.
View Link [techchannel.att.com]
