Stop, Watch and Plotz! 1981 Report on the New Phenomenon of Internet News

Watch the whole video!

“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...but...it's not likely to be much competition to the 20 cent street edition.”

via Tech Crunch
Hat tip to James Bressi
Bonus Links:
- Online Newspaper Visits Up 27%
- Steve Outing in Editor & Publisher: The All-Digital Newsroom of the Not Too Distant Future

That is classic...

Although I wish that we couldn't see the ads...:)

I love the phone hook up with the red rotary phone...

Imagine 20 years from now, how will we be thinking looking at holographic screens and air buttons.

I love it how they wrote a caption that read "Richard Halloran Owns Home Computer". What an interesting look back.

I love this, but... Nay, Nay, Nay! Nothing about the "Internet" at all. You need to change the headline, which is really misleading (old Internet hands will think it refers to "newsgroups").

This piece describes CompuServe, which was a closed information system, open to registered users. Its users could not connect with users of other early online services like The Source, The WELL, Delphi, Quantum (AOL), GEnie or computer bulletin boards. They were all equally as closed. At the time, the proto-internet was still in the confines of academic and research computing networks, where early open interconnection was in place, but inaccessible to the masses and would be for another 10 years at the time of this broadcast.

This piece also illustrates how early the country's important newspapers were to come to the medium. I was at The Source, having come from newspapers, and tried like the devil to point to the most heavily used services - chat, email and "computer conferencing" - as where the users where spending their time and metered-use dollars: connecting with each other. It is sobering now to think of that 30 years of newspaper online experience and to read Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post today write about the accelerating implosion of the newspaper industry that is underway. Masthead by masthead.

(I need to disinter "Before the Web," which I set up to recount -- accurately -- the antecedents of the Internet and the Web. CompuServe, The Source and others built a paying audience of more than 12 million by the time Mosaic-Netscape appeared. A pretty good beta test audience to work from, which hardly anyone remembers.)