Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!isishq!p101.f162.n221.z1.FIDONET.ORG!Doug.Thompson From: Doug.Thompson@p101.f162.n221.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Doug Thompson) Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Subject: Re: Electronic Newspapers Message-ID: <2487.2489FC06@isishq.FIDONET.ORG> Date: 4 Jun 89 15:34:55 GMT Sender: ufgate@isishq.FIDONET.ORG (newsout1.25) Organization: FidoNet node 1:221/162.101 - ISIS International , Waterloo ON Lines: 66 > In article <174@marvin.moncam.co.uk>, harry@moncam.co.uk (Jangling > Neck Nipper) writes: > > ... > 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??? Well, a "broadhseet" has twice as much space per page as a tabloid. Pictures require a lot of bytes of data to transmit and they also require compatible software and hardware for adequate display. Text, however, requires one byte per character, and there is a widely used standard for the transmission or translation of that data. On a tabloid page you have something like 80 column inches and in one column inch you have no more than 200 bytes. So a tabloid page (of 9 point text on 10 point leading with a five column [11.5 pica] format) can at most contain 16,000 characters, or 16K of data. Compressed, that would be about 8K and ten pages of that can be transmitted over off-the-shelf modems, like the Telebit Trailblazer, the USR HST, the Hayes 9600 or any V32 modem in a one minute telephone call. So a 20 page broadsheet, text only, in ascii form, would take about four minutes to pass over the modem. Because ASCII allows us to use only one byte for each character, it is quite efficient compared to graphic means of digitizing a "picture" of a character, or anything else. That's why e-mail is so much more efficient than FAX for instance. E-mail sends one byte per character while FAX, or any pictorial representation, requires one byte for each 1/300th of a square inch, or something like that. However, FAX provides an interesting index of graphic transmission. FAX can move three pages a minute, that's a 8 1/2" x 11" page, or one half of a tabloid page or one fourth of a broadsheet page. So a broadsheet page, complete with pictures, would take 1 1/3 minutes to transmit with current FAX techniques. So, with straight ascii you can get five pages a minute and with FAX techniques you can move most of a page a minute. FAX includes the pictures, ascii of course doesn't. Nevertheless, with distributed networking where the source system distributes a five minute file to, say, 100 other systems each of whom distribute to another 100, etc., a very few tiers can move the data at 9600 over modems to very many users very quickly. Where you have deticated lines, ethernets, LANs, etc., the data throughput rates are, of course, much, much higher. In other words, getting the daily newspaper on your home PC is really quite feasible with moderately-priced, off-the-shelf hardware. It is my guess that 90% of the value of a newspaper lies in the text, and only about 10% lies in the pictures. That is just a guess, but the point is that a newspaper without pictures is still a valuable item - it doesn't become worthless by removing the pictures. =Doug -- Doug Thompson - via FidoNet node 1:221/162 UUCP: ...!watmath!isishq!162.101!Doug.Thompson Internet: Doug.Thompson@p101.f162.n221.z1.FIDONET.ORG