I came across these tidbits today while reading the news in my RSS reader (on my highly mobile iPod Touch) and had to share.

Newsweek (1995): The Internet? Bah!

Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?

Local news report (KRON, 1981) on reading the newspaper on your computer:

… Imagine if you will…

[…] It takes over two hours to receive the entire text of the newspaper over the phone, and with an hourly usage charge of $5, the new tele-paper won’t be much competition for the twenty-cent street edition.