This Is What A Disruptive Technology Looks Like . . .

. . . in its first moments.  Hat tip to FB pal and Power Line reader Kate Pitrone for flagging this old video from 1981, showing the earliest experiments with online news gathering and transmission.  I vividly recall seeing the earliest version of FAX technology back in 1981, when my mentor M. Stanton Evans would send his syndicated column to the Los Angeles Times by wrapping each page of the typescript seriatim around a five-inch diameter cylinder, which would then spin at high speed while some kind of early optical character reader would digitize it and transmit it over one of those phone-receiver-in-the-rubber-holster contraptions.  It took about ten minutes to send three of four pages through.

When you take in this video now, you can’t help but chuckle at how clueless these reporters and editors are about what is about to mow them down.  (For one thing, the SF Examiner really doesn’t exist any more–not like the form you see in this video.)  I think today’s equivalently clueless people about to get run over by rapid technological change are college professors and administrators.  Anyway, enjoy this two minutes of pure schadenfreude for old media:

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