I came across a delightful YouTube clip from the early 1980s about newspapers doing experiments with “newspapers by computer.” It is a must-see for anyone who enjoys comparing our world today with the future foreseen or predicted by experts of yesteryear.
What I found most interesting was a remark at the end that compared the relative costs of online news with print editions:
“It takes over two hours to receive the entire text of the newspaper over the phone. And with an hourly use charge of five dollars, the new telepaper won’t be much competition for the twenty-cent street edition.”
Online news was over 50 times as expensive then. How times have changed…
