Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!hwcs!zen!frank From: frank@zen.co.uk (Frank Wales) Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Subject: Re: Electronic Newspapers Message-ID: <1582@zen.co.uk> Date: 11 May 89 11:41:58 GMT References: <8905090927.AA04835@s2.Tau.Ac.IL> Reply-To: frank@zen.co.uk (Frank Wales) Organization: Zengrange Limited, Leeds, England Lines: 60 In article <8905090927.AA04835@s2.Tau.Ac.IL> writes: >Are you suggesting that I take my portable computer with me everyehere? For >example, I'll sit in a caffee, sipping a glass of coffee, eating a croison and >looking for the latest news in my portable (which is connected to the caffee's >telephone line, surly). > >I find it a bit unprobable. The all picture seems to be ruined by the entry >of a portable computer to this particular scene (The caffee, I mean). Why? Don't assume that a portable computer has to be the size of a Compaq, or mains powered. I currently have a Z88, which is the size and weight of an A4 folder. I can carry it most places without trouble. Sure, this doesn't have a whomping great hard disk, for example, but it can already have >1MB of memory in it, and in a few years I expect machines of similar size to be substantially more capacious (order of magnitude increase, say) without resorting to actual mechanical hard drives. Even the new Toshiba and Zenith portables aren't that large or bulky, even with hard drives. As far as information-gathering goes, what's wrong with digital radio broadcasting? Cellular networks currently being installed in many parts of the world have a bandwidth easily wide enough to support dissemination of such information, and the size and cost of receivers is dropping almost daily (witness the cost of the second-generation cellular phones currently appearing in Europe). Dialling a remote host to pick up and send messages would be little trouble. Furthermore, a simple form of electronic newspaper has been available in Britain (and some other European countries too, I believe) for some years. The T.V. companies broadcast teletext information embedded in the outgoing picture signal in some of the off-screen scan lines, and a decoder board in the set can display this information instead of (or superimposed on) the normal picture. Several hundred "pages" of information are available on each of the four national channels, providing news, finance, travel, entertainment and sport information, features (mainly TV-related), complete broadcast schedules and capsule reviews of programmes, and even other things like competitions, stories, horoscopes (ah, well :-(), software, religious news and classified advertising. The information can be updated whenever necessary by the service provider, and the delay associated with picking up a new page is on the order of tens of seconds (assuming the receiver doesn't buffer all "interesting" pages already). The service is free to anyone with a suitably equipped receiver, of which there are millions in the U.K.. It is also possible to buy decoder boards which plug into a computer and provide it with the ability to capture this broadcast information. There is no reason why a portable couldn't do this, nor any reason why the volume of the service couldn't be stepped up enormously if the demand warranted it without in any way swamping broadcast channels. I certainly don't see any problems with having a notebook-sized computer that can keep in touch with others via cordless communications, and that can grab news and other information of value from the airwaves. Essentially, it could be built now. -- Frank Wales, Systems Manager, [frank@zen.co.uk<->mcvax!zen.co.uk!frank] Zengrange Ltd., Greenfield Rd., Leeds, ENGLAND, LS9 8DB. (+44) 532 489048 x217