Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!batcomputer!itsgw!steinmetz!crdgw1!uunet!sco!evanh
From: evanh@sco.COM (Evan A.C. Hunt)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: Electronic Newspapers
Message-ID: <2907@viscous.sco.COM>
Date: 6 May 89 04:16:46 GMT
References: <8905031352.AA16555@mica.berkeley.edu> <174@marvin.moncam.co.uk>
Reply-To: evanh@sco.COM (Evan A.C. Hunt)
Organization: The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.
Lines: 32

harry@moncam.co.uk (Jangling Neck Nipper):

>Are we talking about news over the 'phone, or having the newspaper deliverer 
>chuck us a ROM thro' the letterbox?  Until 'phone line speeds are comparable
>to ethernet, it's just not going to be practical, is it?  The average, 20
>page full size (ie, not tabloid - does it have a name?) newspaper must
>require several magabytes, including pictures, and ROMs ain't that cheap
>either, so what *are* we talking about here???

	We can send TV signals around on cables, and that takes
pretty impressive bandwidth--thirty pictures a second.  I'm sure
with some reasonable compaction algorithm you could download a
newspaper from a TV channel in a few minutes, probably a lot less.
So you set up a service on your cable system, on one of those thirty
or forty available channels that I've never known a cable system
to use, which, every few minutes, blasts out the latest news.
When you want to read the news, you turn on your receiver, which
waits for the next transmission on channel 90 to begin, and reads
it in when it does.  The system would probably have to transmit
slower than it was capable of doing, though, because we wouldn't
want it to go faster than the receiver's mass storage.  How long
does it take to write several megabytes on a hard disk?  Two, three
minutes, maybe?  Then that's our lower limit on speed.

	Now the only problem is getting enough people to buy receivers
to make it worth the cable company's time and money.


-- 
    Evan A.C. Hunt			evanh@sco.COM	
    The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.	uunet!sco!evanh 
    (408) 425-7222			evanh%sco.COM@ucscc.ucsc.EDU