Following up on my post yesterday in which I discussed the similarities and differences between newspaper and health care content commodification, I was steered to a great piece of video history by a tweet from Dan Cohen, Director of Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

This YouTube video is a local news segment from a San Francisco TV station in 1981 about this wild experiment of 8 newspapers to deliver the content of their daily publications to home computers.

Although the story is delivered with complete seriousness, it was hard not to laugh out loud. I’m not sure which is the funniest piece of the story:

• The newscaster seemingly uncomfortable with the word “computer.”
• The caption under a consumer that reads, “Home Computer Owner.”
• It takes 2 hours to download all the contents (text only) of the daily newspaper.
• The San Francisco Examiner staffer saying that they’re trying to learn…and perhaps unintentionally foreshadowing the direction of the online news industry: “We’re not in it to make money. We’re probably not going to lose a lot, but…”

Some good lessons here on what technology predictions from less then 3 decades ago look like in retrospect.

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