From 1981:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WCTn4FljUQ

The best part is the end where they say this technology is "a few years off", and the anchor says don't expect this to be competition to the printed newspaper.

Wow, that was pretty cool. We've come a long way!

The most interesting part is that to download the entire daily paper back then would have cost $10 in 1981 dollars. Likely, there would have been long distance phone charges from the phone company on top of that.

Does anybody remember a Married...With Children episode from the late 1980s that lampooned the idea of home computers? For much of the 1980s and early 90s, a lot of non-techie types would have probably said, "why would anybody want a computer in the home?"

The idea of electronically delivered newspaper has been around for some time. The upper 2 mhz of the "new" 100 mhz FM band (106-108 mhz) was initially intended to be used for transmitting "Fax" information. I once saw an old "Radio Craft" (or similar) magazine that depicted an artists conception of the daily newspaper being ejected out of a slot in the front of a console radio.

New York Times, June 28, 1945
by Winifred Mallon

WASHINGTON, June 27 - The Federal Communications Commission, ordered today the assignment to frequency modulation of ninety channels between 88 and 106 megacycles, twenty of which, from 88 to 92 megacycles, are for non-commercial educational FM. Facsimile is assigned the 106-108 megacycle band.

Edited from:

http://www.nrcdxas.org/articles/earlyfm.html

Alfredo_t: Does anybody remember a Married...With Children episode from the late 1980s that lampooned the idea of home computers? For much of the 1980s and early 90s, a lot of non-techie types would have probably said, "why would anybody want a computer in the home?"

Not really. Home computers were quote common in the 1980s. I bought one in 1983 when I was in high school, but I had several friends whose parents had already bought them. The Commodore 64 was a very popular home computer, in part because it hooked up to your television if you wanted and you could play games with it - it had a game cartridge slot like an Atari game console and two joystick ports, so you could play arcade games with it. But there were also word processors and printers in the homes, too. TRS-80 and Apples were kind of higher-end home computers, and basic word processing programs for them were fairly easy to use, if primitive by today's standards.

I actually wrote my own word processor when I was in high school (very primitive) because I didn't want to spend $100 to buy one. I had a decent dot matrix printer, and I wrote most of my high school term papers on it.

I've still got my Commodore 64!!

I remember paying right at $500 for the disk drive, a Panasonic 9 pin dot matrix printer and an adapter to change serial to parallel for the printer because the Commodore didn't have a parallel printer port!

I was going thru some old stuff over the weekend and found a RTTY cartridge for the C64!

Yeah, I've got my C64 too - also my Vic 20. Haven't tried to power them on in years.

I had one of the first 16-bit Commodore 64s ever! I was working for a company in college that made 16-bit replacement chips for the 8-bit chips used in the Apple computers. It was a direct plug replacement in a Vic 20, but in a C64, you needed an adapter, so I wired one up. I could have written 16 bit software for it but who else could have used it?

I bought a Commodore 128 and a Commodore 1902 monitor from a buddy that owns a pawn shop in St. Louis (when I still lived there).

The C-128 is long gone, but what's funny is that I still use the monitor on my workbench. It is hooked up to the video output of an old VCR which is fed by the 2nd receiver in one of my Dish Network DVR's!!

The audio comes out of the VCR to my Heathkit AA-32 tube amplifier and then to 8" Heathkit speakers that I built!

I think I built the amp in the late 60's! Still sounds pretty good and I haven't had to replace the tubes in it for over 20 years!

Yeah, I still use my old Commodore 1702 monitor I bought in the 80s as my bedroom TV. I used an old VCR as the receiver til I got my DTV box. Other than the fact that the 1702 has manual volume and power control, it still works fine.

Our first home computer was a Vic 20 hooked up to my parent's 13 inch TV in their bedroom. I remember playing the game "Choplifter" on it.

In the novel "2001: A Space Odyssey" (which was published simultaneously with the 1968 movie release), Arthur Clarke describes something called the News Pad, which is a sort of tablet with a screen listing the day's news headlines. The user could decide which stories to read by pressing a corresponding button. Apparently Clarke was at least vaguely aware of the computer networking experiments going on at the time, and was thus able to conceive of something very close to what we have now.

Clarke really understood a lot of tech trends. Miss that guy...

Our family had Atari machines. For a time I had a C64. My uncle had one too. There was a word processor for it that would do document includes, and conditionals. He setup parametric real-estate contracts on it and used it nearly to the end of the 90's!

@vitalogy: Those older games, like "Choplifter" were good simple fun.

*Just restored an original 6 switch Atari VCS (2600).

"*Just restored an original 6 switch Atari VCS (2600)."

Made in the US of A ??

NO!!

I want one of those badly, but only about 500K were made here in Sunnyvale CA. Mine is Taiwan. Serial number 523K something. Got close!!

At least it's the right model.

for some time back then computers did have kind of a bad reputation(only big businesses used them!)Phone company,etc.

In the Revolutionary Road movie, the main character (played by Leonardo DeCaprio) is assigned to a team whose job it was to market computers to business clients. In 1955, the idea of using computers for inventory and production control (as the marketing materials that he develops during the film suggest) would have been quite "Revolutionary." I'd like to read the book that inspired the film sometime to see if it had the main character doing that same job, or if the script writers changed some things around to make the story more believable for 2009's viewers.

In one scene of the film, he explains a computer to his wife: "A computer is like a really fast adding machine, except that it has thousands of vacuum tubes instead of mechanical parts." As he says this, he makes a sketch on a paper napkin that looks like a refrigerator with racks full of tubes.

From an Amazon book review:

"Frank works in business machines, which seems incredibly boring, but is about to transform into a new age of computers."

Sounds like an interesting book/movie!