(Roughly) Daily

In the 1930s, ATT was rolling out dial phones to the American public…

This short subject newsreel was shown in movie theaters the week before a town’s or region’s telephone exchange was to be converted to dial service. It’s extremely short—a little over a minute, like a PSA. The film concisely explains how to use a dial telephone, including how to dial, how to recognize dial tone, and how to recognize a busy signal…

For a look into the then-future (the now present), fast forward just over 50 years, to the early 90s and to ATT’s predictions…

More in ATT Tech Channel.

[TotH to @BoingBoing for a pointer to the first video]

* Arthur C. Clarke (a 1976 interview with whom is in the Tech Channel trove)

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As we ponder progress, we might send , ATT-related birthday greetings to Robert Woodrow Wilson; he was born on this date in 1936.  An astronomer, he detected– with Bell Labs colleague Arno Penzias– cosmic microwave background radiation: “relic radiation”– that’s to say, the “sound “– of the Big Bang…. familiar to those of old enough to remember watching an old-fashioned television after the test pattern was gone (when there was no broadcast signal received): the “fuzz” we saw and the static-y sounds we heard, were the “relic radiation” being picked up.

Their 1964 discovery earned them the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.

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