The World Before The Internet

It may seem as though the Internet has always been with us, but it hasn't. I know this from long experience.

The last newspaper job I had as a reporter was at a five-day business newspaper that was started in 1827 by, among others, Samuel F. B. Morse to provide maritime news. The newspaper had its own schooners to sail out and intercept vessels to get stories ahead of the competition. When I joined it the schooners were long gone and the paper was owned by Knight-Ridder, although the company kept my employer apart from the more mainstream newspapers.

In 1995 Knight-Ridder sold the paper to The Economist Group. Like Knight-Ridder the new owner didn't really know what to do with us. Knight-Ridder would later disappear after being sold to the McClatchy Group in 2006.

Under the Economist Group the paper's focus was broadened beyond transportation (on land and at sea) and insurance (my beat) to more stories on trade and finance.  

When I worked there the Internet - or the World Wide Web as we called it in the 1990s, was something new for our office. Few of us knew how it worked. There was only one computer hooked up to the Web, and that computer was zealously guarded by the librarian. Before the Internet, if you needed information you went to the library - aka "the morgue" - and asked the librarian to pull down whatever volume you needed and then you thumbed through until you got the information you sought. It was a long and tiring process.

Today that would be the Stone Age for those who only know from Google. Now there are plenty of search engines and you can research without having to leave your desk for hours because the information you need - both true and false - is literally at your fingertips - or mine in the case of this post.

Vecteezi.com

We did use computers in my newspaper office but it was a closed system. We could message each other or file the stories we wrote to the editors. No Internet.

If the librarian liked you she let you log into the Internet computer yourself and wouldn't hover over you. I was lucky in being liked by her. I used the computer every so often but was confused about this thing called the Internet. I knew it was started as a way for federal government computers to "talk" to each other during the Cold War. But I had a hard time wrapping my brain around how to use it for work.

Yes, I was innocent back then.

Nowadays there are computers on your smartphone - another thing we didn't have then. There are computers in your TV. You have laptops with more power and memory than a room full of ENIAC computers. If we filed a story from the road we used Radio Shack laptops. We called them "trashes" because you had a very small screen to write on, very little memory and an operating system that was trash. Hooking it with a rubber coupler to a phone receiver to send what you wrote was a pain. I hated having to use it. Now, I would be able to bring a laptop and file much more easily. 

Thanks to the Internet, the newspaper as it was became obsolete. You could get the news you needed far faster on a computer than waiting for the next day's newspaper. In 2000, the print newspaper became a weekly news magazine. There have been a lot of mergers involving the old paper since then. The publication is now part of a unit of Standard & Poor's. 

And, thanks to the Internet, as has happened to many other newspapers, the publication is Web-only.

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