Comments on: Home-printed newspapers, 1939 style

By: Bill Janssen

Bill Janssen — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 22:51:33 +0000

I can’t believe the MediaNews Group is trying this. They essentially want to sell you a custom machine which you hook up to your network to print your daily newspaper. “The printer will format the stories and print them.” What the heck? Why not a program you run on your PC, or via AJAX on a Web site, which does that and gives you a PDF you can send to your existing printer (or your cell phone)? This seems to be another pre-doomed idea.

By: Joseph Gray

Joseph Gray — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 21:41:16 +0000

As to “nothing new”, even the marketing photo doesn’t show that huge roll of paper that would be required and wouldn’t fit inside that cabinet. Let’s see – 1939 – would they have had thermal paper, or would it have been that aluminum coated paper that required an electric spark to make dots? I don’t believe it would have been photosensitive paper on a continuous roll. Besides, you would have needed a development lab crammed into that cabinet for photosensitive paper.

By: Garson O'Toole

Garson O'Toole — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 19:29:34 +0000

The home newspaper printer is retrofuturism at its finest. The blog Paleo-Future is filled with fascinating, obsolete and unusual visions of a future that is now our past. The blog also features some dreams that may still be realized. You can compare Apple's Knowledge Navigator Video from 1987 to the recently released Microsoft 2019 Future Vision Montage. The link to the highly-polished Microsoft video is from the Nieman Journalism Lab blog.

By: Rich Adin

Rich Adin — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 18:23:51 +0000

Just goes to prove, David, that there is nothing new — it has all been imagined (and patented) before.