Earlier quoted context omitted.
They put a different meter on it and it was prohibitively expensive. ATT was early on a lot of technology such as working with MagicCap and Go. They had their own Hobbit processor. It was pretty cool tech until you saw the pricetag. Then you laughed, and laughed, tears rolled down your face ... $2,000 devices in 1995 money with $200/month usage bills being common (modern money is about double so think $4,000 tablet)…
There’s a movie directed by Wim Wenders called “Until the End of the World” with tech similar to this. It’s a Pay phones actually, where you’d flip the arm with the screen up attached up to make a call and down to end a call. The movie is really an alternate universe where tech like this is ubiquitous. There’s something about the late 90s / early 00s vision for tech future I have an increasingly difficult time graspi…
You want that era? Here's two things to flip through
https://archive.org/search.php?query=mondo+2000
https://archive.org/search.php?query=verbum%20magazine
I went deep into that for back research on my most recent article https://siliconfolklore.com/internet-history/
I'll revisit it soon for something else I'm sure. Maybe the Douglas Rushkoff Cyberia world where this tech scene was entangled with the most hedonistic strains of new-ageism and overly indulgent on psychotropics - where a burner rambling about their dreams who won't live to see Y2K is somehow in the same car with a 25 year old stanford grad who just made $10 million and maybe just maybe how these ways of meaning somehow re-emerged together 20 years later to build the modern far right.
That's not my theory here btw, that's what I've been hearing from the journalists that covered it in the 90s. Pulling those narratives together from an outsider perspective using primary source material ... that's my offer.