Frank Rich’s column in today’s New York Times mentions, in passing, a YouTube video entitled “1981 Primitive Internet Report on KRON,” in which San Francisco’s Channel 4 news announced that the San Francisco Chronicle and its then-jointly operated (and now defunct) semi-rival the San Francisco Examiner had started a service that allowed computer owners with modems to download text copies of the morning paper (download time: 2 hrs).
Here’s the report:
It really is a fascinating historical document that nicely shows the technological and cultural distance we’ve traveled in a little over a quarter century. My favorite moment: the chyron that identifies one speaker as:
Richard Halloran
Owns Home Computer
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My co-blogger put it this way a while back, “If the death of newsprint was a game of Clue, you might say that the Examiner did it in the Cubby Hole with the Rotary Phone.”
http://historysideshow.blogspot.com/2009/01/internet-newspaper-in-age-of-mainframe.html
Thanks for a great blog – I’ve been really enjoying it lately,
Mralarm, owner of a personal computer