"Imagine if you will, sitting down to your morning coffee, turning on your home computer to read the day's newspaper. Well it's not as far fetched as it may seem. In fact, both local San Francisco papers are investing a lot of money to try to get a service just like that started" - KRON-TV, channel 4 (circa 1981)
The video clip that follows shows an early perspective of what would become the commercial internet. It is a segment from a KRON-TV, channel 4 broadcast from 1981 that talks about how people will one day use computers to read the news.
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. - Steve Miller, News Center 4
Yeah right Steve. Like we're really going to somehow read the newspaper on a computer. Sounds like science fiction to me and I'm just not believing it.
But seems like in 1981 there were already people connected to some type of series of tubes that would allow them to read newspapers using nothing but a computer. Richard Halloran is one of them.
"With this system, we have the option not only of seeing the newspaper on the screen, but also we can - optionally we can copy it. So anything we're interested in we can go back in again and copy it onto paper and save it which I think is the future of the type of interrogation an individual will give to the newspapers." - Richard Halloran - Owns Home Computer
Now I didn't have a computer until '84 (an awesome Apple IIe that I fondly miss), yet I had no idea that people were surfing Gopher & MySpace back then. Ok, well maybe not Gopher (Gopher didn't come out until '91).
Interweb access must have been pretty slow back in '81, and it was:
"It takes over 2 hours to receive the entire text of the newspaper over the phone and with an hourly use charge of 5 dollars, the new telepaper won't be much competition for the 20 cents street edition." - KRON-TV, channel 4
Man, those early adopters sure had to wait a long time to get the news.
Watch the video below, it's great.
Who would have thought? It is truly impressive how far along computers and the interweb have come since 1981.
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