The future is now: A report from 1981

“Engineers now predict the day will come when we get all our newspapers and magazines by home computer," the narrator says with a hint of sarcasm, continuing, "but that's a few years off." Indeed.

The piece from 1981 is about the earliest days of digital media, when the lucky few home computer users could view content from a handful of prominent papers on their "television screens" by dialing into their CompuServe Information Service with their rotary phones.

It's interesting to see how many people involved in the project had a resolutely realistic take on the whole thing, assuming, despite how clunky current technologies were, that digital media was the unavoidable future—a sentiment that has since lost favor in newsrooms, now that it's actually coming to pass.

Click on the headline to listen to a viedo of the 1981 report

Thanks to Jim Kavanagh (BJ copy desk chief now at CNN} for sending us the link.