In the classic promotional film above–complete with some snappy cartoon art–AT&T pitches something it calls PersonaLink Services. This was a kind of online platform that used artificial intelligence to remake our lives by way of emerging portable computers such as the Apple Newton and the AT&T EO Personal Communicator. But since that’s a little hard to wrap your around, AT&T pulled out the cloud metaphor–something that had long been used among networking and telecom types.

“You can think of our electronic meeting place as the cloud,” says the film’s narrator, in the kind of dulcet tones that seemed to accompany every corporate message in the late-80s and early-90s.