This is hilarious.

[apocalypsos]

A 1981 news report in the Bay Area about getting the newspaper on your home computer (I burst out laughing at the "punchline."):

Comments

[wrenlet.livejournal.com]

*squeals with nostalgia* The old-time phone cradle modem! The 300-baud transmission speed! (Yes, I can identify it by the speed of the text crawl, in '88 I had a Texas Instruments terminal with an internal 300-baud modem. FLASHBACKS.)

[20thcenturyvole.livejournal.com]

*stares*

*looks at seven BBC news tabs on browser*

The times, they do change.

[trinity_clare]

*hides open Huffington Post tabs*

[paranoidgrl.livejournal.com]

Awww, they're so cute, what with the innocence. Al Gore hadn't even invented the 'net yet. I just want to pinch their cheeks.

[madripoor-rose.livejournal.com]

Heh.

It's always fun to look around and count just how many things we have that used to be science fiction.

[scary-being-me.livejournal.com]

LOL

I was reading an article this morning on MSN about the worst tech predictions of all time.

They had quotes like the CEO of IBM saying there was a market for maybe 5 computers in the world; the CEO of Digital saying no one would want a computer in their home; and some Hollywood bigwig predicting that TV was a fad that wouldn't last a year.

[scary-being-me.livejournal.com]

From cars to space shuttles to smart phones to cybernetic limbs...the list goes on and on.

And yet, I still don't have a flying car.

[suaine.livejournal.com]

Aww, that is so adorable!

[elusive-life-77.livejournal.com]

Oh man, that was the best thing I've seen all week! My boss and I were laughing like loons when the guy started dialing on the old rotary phone...wow, we have come a really long way from there.

[myniamh.livejournal.com]

RICHARD HALLORAN
OWNS HOME COMPUTER

XD

[scary-being-me.livejournal.com]

I cracked up at that.

[sabra-n.livejournal.com]

It's funny - there's a common conception of newspapers as being behind the times and slow to catch up with technology, but they were aware of the potential of electronic distribution well before the Internet really had a toehold in the consumer marker, and the big papers put up good websites well before other types of companies did. But they got screwed anyway.

[myniamh.livejournal.com]

AND WE'RE WATCHING HIM ON YOUTUBE! *BOGGLES*

[hemlock-martini.livejournal.com]

All of this text posting on the internet is going to seem awfully primitive eventually.

[viscero.livejournal.com]

(Whoa! Did he really say "... of the estimated two to three thousand home computer users in the Bay Area ..."?)

It seems it's fairly common for forward-thinking people to predict technologies (mobile phones were predicted way back in 1908, for example), but it's never possible to get the details right, and when the predictions come true, they're always far more extraordinary than the predictors could have guessed. For example, these people (the technical people, I mean, not the news-tards), knew that eventually you'd be able to read an entire newspaper on your home computer, but I'm sure they imagined it as people using faster versions of that modem to connect directly to the newspaper's computer system.