“Imagine, if you will, sitting down to your morning coffee, turning on your home computer to see the day’s newspaper. Well, it’s not as far-fetched as it may seem.”
Thus begins this video of a 1981 KRON report predicting the rise of news reporting on the internet.
You need to see this, it’s pure gold.
My favorite quotes:
David Cole (S.F. Examiner): “This is an experiment. We’re trying to figure out what it’s going to mean to us, as editors and reporters and what it means to the home user. And we’re not in it to make money, we’re probably not going to lose a lot but we aren’t going to make much either.”
KRON reporter: “This is only the first step in newspapers by computers. Engineers now predict the day will come when we get all our newspapers and magazines by home computer, but that’s a few years off.”
This article was written by Robin Wauters (owns home computer). 
(Source: i-am-bored, via popurls@Twitter)
“we’re probably not going to lose a lot”…..heartbreaking.
totally
http://www.zenbylunch.com
On the other hand, they had more than 20 years to prepare…
No joke.
Nice find. Kind of makes me feel for them.
awesome…:) its really coool… america as country has delivered some of the best things to man kind! … makes one feel jealous about it. but kudos to your open-minded competitive approach, america!
The WWW was invented in Europe by a European.
The World Wide Web was invented by Europeans, but the Internet, which predated the WWW by decades, was invented in America by Americans.
i was…
errmmm
not even existent at that time. But man, everytime these guys see Google or any other internet success story, i bet they’ll be like…
“I created those fools!”
haha
CoolestJobsOnline
http://tinyurl.com/7uj5ay
whow … seems like long time ago, but is not that far ! RT’d @ http://www.tweetube.com/7f
Classic!
haha i sent it out too!
http://twitter....atus/1158173511
Wonderful, great to see those old videos, one year before I was born. I remembered my dad using text based services in the 80s and he also used CompuServe, the good old days. Love the perm.
I’m dating myself, but at 13 I worked for a marketing company that was doing work for Commodore when the VIC-20 was launched, and we were trained, then set up in the electronics sections of department stores to demo these machines. Mostly I just played Gorf, but we also demoed CompuServe, The Source, and Dow Jones News & Retrieval. DJNR was essentially the same as what Google News is now (save automation).
I still have my “I’m a Commodore Kid!” polo shirt.
Really miss those rotary-dial phones – what would those folks have thought about broadband and iPhone!!
“With the exception of pictures, ads, and the comics”
Oh, how adorable! I sometimes wish we could survive without those ads… but I know for sure the majority of social bookmarkers would never be able to stand an article without pictures… they’d actually have to read it!
We’ve come a long way… What’s in store for the future? Faxing 3D objects or smell-o-vision? I’m excited.
oh yeah, back in these days… Hell i still love this 8bit shit
Thank you for this cool reminder…..
Are those bell bottoms their wearing, or is it just the great video quality making them look wide?
The Franchise King
Priceless! I love the caption “Owns Home Computer.” We’ve come a long way baby…
Indee, priceless
Makes you think of the good old offline days…
it takes about 2 hours to transfer the newspaper into the computer
they got me on this one
Yeah, this was really caught me too. I do not miss dial-up
Lol. Now we’re thinking even bigger than that.
2 to3 thousand home computers in the bay area!!
Haha, yeah that was the best part! Probably more computers than people now.
yeah, the pricetag on the “electronic newspaper” and the 2 hrs delay, might seem as a difficult businesscase
Awesome video, but sorry to say: very dump blogtitle :-p
Love that Flash technology !
Great one there.. All that in 1981
I am afraid, its not the kind of post I expect to read on TechCrunch… As the turndown affects startups, would it mean more of such content here?
AJ, I’m feeling an urge to stomp your face right now.
please let us not forget minitel which had considerable success in france!
Gotta love 1981!
http://www.zenbylunch.com
I believe some of those green screens in the news room were “Atex terminals”.
I was working at Atex in 1981 – there may be Atex terminals in the wide shot of the newsroom but I’m not 100% sure. I remember there was someone experimenting with an early Telex feed at Atex at that time, but the future we really saw at the time was more about WSIWYG than online capabilities.
This is probably one of the coolest things ive ever seen on TC
i must download this video…save it for my children…dee
The TV reporter’s comments clearly explain what happen to the industry:
1) “With the exception of pictures, ads, and the comics” yes, it’s obvious the reader wants the ads
2) at two hours this can’t compete with 20 cent print edition. Yep, telecommunications will never get better
Both comments very old school. Denial was there even in 1981.
1) Ads, whether we like them or not (and we don’t) are necessary to sustain an online publication… So them not being there makes it difficult to get some revenue going on without asking subscribers to pay a fee, don’t you think…
2) Well that was telecommunications at it’s best and at that time it could not compete with the 20 cent print edition… I fail to see any denial there.
The thing is that you might have had to live that era to know what it was like back then.
I mean, you see the SF Editor telling you that they want it to happen, how come that’s denial. I think denial grew more recently.
Terrible, reading text only newspapers!? How boring, it’s like reading a book…
BTW, what Windows version did they use in 1981?
Vista Business.
Windows 1.0 came out in 1985, four years after this report, and MS-DOS was still about a year away. They probably used Unix or some minor OS lost in time now.
Who would of ever thought we would advance this far.
Splendid! For the first time I felt how it feels to be in the future…..
Great post my friend. Thanks for sharing …. I will Tweet this post.
Wow… They mentioned Columbus in this report and not even Arrington has chimed in with a “Where’s Columbus?” jab.
Very cool vid. TRS80 and Commodores….amazing times.
The future of newspaper’s online is Silverwyn. pierrelittle.com
Sorry if this has been answered before, but —
What the hell is a newspaper?
Just Google it. I found an interesting Wikipedia article about this “newspaper”
http://en.wikip.../wiki/Newspaper
“Anything we’re interested in, we can go back in again and copy it onto paper and save it.”
> Anything we’re interested in,
> we can go back in again and copy it…
…And thus the stage was set for an epic battle between good and evil.
They have the newspapers and magazines on computers now? What an age we live in!
“…the two to three thousand computer owners in the bay area…”
Wow.
Rotary dial phones and if I’m not mistaken the newspaper editors are on Radio Shack Color Computers (Coco’s) hooked up to TV’s. How frigging cool is that?!? Take that you Mac geeks!
Best tidbit: “The estimated 2,000 to 3,000 home computer users in the Bay Area.”
I loved that bit too, there’s got to be at least double that now
My favorite part is the ending where the reporter says it takes over 2 hours to download the text at the cost of approx. $5/hour.
CLASSIC!!!!!!!!
Took two hours to download a paper. Cost $5 vs. 20 cents for teh paper edition back then.
Interesting parallel.
1981: Takes 2 hours to download the paper (probably could be ’streamed’ by sections).
2009: Takes most broadband users 2 hours to download a full bluray movie (which of course could be streamed linearly)
2037: Takes 2 seconds to download movie in hologram format and watch the action unfold in your living room.
You show me where you can stream 50GB everytime you want to watch a movie. 2 hours is 7megaBYTES/s
$5 x 2 hours = $10.
That said, I guess the NYT wouldn’t be in such dire straits if they could charge 10 bucks per edition!
Any ideas on what video from this year we’ll look back on and think the same things?
Electric cars? Solar energy providers? Augmented Reality glasses? 3D TV’s?
A few years ago I would have said mobile internet, but that’s already become pretty widespread.
It’s remarkable that it took about another 20 years until newspapers where widely available on the net and being accepted by a large audience.
The best line I think was “we’re still probably a few years away from having all of our newspapers and magazines delivered to our computers” (slight paraphrase).
20 years > “a few away”
Regardless, 1981… wow, that is pretty visionary for a newspaper. And yet look at most of the industry now. Sigh.
20 years > “a few years away”
It’s especially interesting to consider this report in light of what happened a couple of years later. 25 years ago, Steve Jobs stood up on a stage and claimed that the Macintosh would become an “appliance.” This kind of thinking, among other things, points to a world where news “papers” could potentially become obsolete. A couple of years later, after Steve Jobs had left Apple, it was obvious to everyone that this whole “appliance” idea was incorrect. Fast-forward a few years, with technology that few dreamed about (even the KRON reporter probably couldn’t envision someone walking down the street, holding a phone, reading the news, and commenting on it), and you can see that there were a few people that could conceive of the fantastic future that was glimpsed at in the KRON report.
Who can I call to get one of those futuristic tele-paper systems installed at my house? Is there a futuristic newsletter I can sign up for?
You have to return the coupon from the January 29, 1981 Examiner. Just ask your folks; they probably have that issue lying around in the stack by the tweed couch.
As an old-time software engineer who was working at Atex in 1981, I can assure you that the pronunciation of the word “cue-pon” in this report is what I find the funniest.
It’s cool to watch that old commercials and now it’s real and normal all that stuff and much more.
This is hilarious. I love the way people thought in the past. I wonder if we will, one day, look back at us now and laugh.
They already are…
fancy schmancy!
Shit. Does this mean Sarah Connor was also right and Skynet will be launching soon?
I love the old TRS-80 in this story!
Did you catch the TRS 80 (lovingly called the Trash 80 in those days, I still have my TRS*) Model 4P (portable, weighed about 20 lbs), and my Commodore Vic20, still work, saving for a museum some day!