Fascinating bit of video knocking around the web.

A 2 minute, 17 second news report from 1981 on a San Francisco TV station. (And note the anchor’s semi-Farrah Fawcett haircut.)

The topic? The delivery of news electronically to subscribers sitting at home.  No paper!

Also, no worry for the print edition, the TV people suggest, because at 20 cents it is far cheaper to buy a copy of the Chronicle from a vendor on the street than the $5 or so it cost to download one of nine U.S. newspapers.

Check it out here.

Then come back for some thoughts.

Even for someone whose career has been in print, and who saw the print industry make several major steps towards extinction, this report is funny. The story is almost treated like a “now, stay with us, but this is really weird” item. If the anchor had not been working alone, they would have scripted some quips between her and whomever. Ron Burgundy, maybe, who certainly would have scoffed and said, “Never gonna happen!”

Couple of other things.

–Did you catch the stat about how many people in the San Francisco Bay area had home computers, in 1981? About 2,000 to 3,000. Counting smart phones, San Francisco today probably has more devices that can access the internet than it does people.

–Did you notice the giant modem that the subscriber’s phone had to go into? We were still doing that, at the end of the decade. Also, the notion of a land line with a cradle? That thing could have gone to the Smithsonian.

–The progressive old guy who thinks that the best use for this electronic paper will be “to print out” stories he likes. So he can access them later. No one is thinking of storing anything. Not yet.

–The notion that this isn’t going to be a problem for newspapers any time soon. That, at least, was accurate. Newspapers were headed into two decades of big profits. Then came the end of the world, around 2000.

–Consider … if we could go from that awkward system, incapable of delivering images, to what we have now in, essentially 30 years … just shocking, almost unimaginable change … what will the next 30 years bring? All I know is this: we can only guess at what it will be, and we probably will be wrong.

–And the classic “’twas ever thus” comment from the guy working at the San Francisco newspaper. “We don’t expect to make much money” at this electronic newspaper thing. Ha.

Nailed that. Almost no newspapers have been able to gain even a healthy fraction of income from the web that they got from the print product.

This internet thing. We don’t actually use that name yet, and it’s goofy and slow, but we thought you might be interested.