Filling in for Readers' Editor Ian Mayes on Saturday, with a piece hung on our forthcoming move to a smaller format printed paper, the Guardian's director of digital publishing Simon Waldman wrote:
The world our Berliner will launch into is almost unrecognisable to the one that greeted our last major change - the redesign of 1988. It was a world with only a handful of TV and radio channels, where the only digital device in your home was an LCD watch or a pocket calculator. There were no mobile phones (well none that you could honestly call "mobile"), no Big Brother, and most important of all, no internet.
Since Simon also mentions 'bloggers who rail against traditional media with the cry "factcheck your ass",' I shall take the liberty of pointing out that some of this isn't true.
The Internet was certainly around in 1988, though not in common use -- I didn't get on until 1992. But the UK did have Janet, the Joint Academic Network, which was connected to the Internet, and it had Prestel, which targeted the mass market.
In fact, lots of people had home computers or video games consoles in the early 1980s, and lots of us were using electronic mail and online systems such as The Source, CompuServe, BT Telecom Gold (Dialcom), and AOL, as well as Prestel(Micronet) and the Fidonet network of bulletin boards (BBS). Even the Guardian had electronic mailboxes in use -- mainly by overseas corrs -- well before we computerised the paper in 1988.
In 1988, home computing was well into its third generation of machines. It started with the pioneering Apple ][ (which was beige), Commodore PET and Tandy TRS-80 at the end of the 1970s, followed by UK machines such as the Sinclair (ZX80/81/Spectrum/QL) and Acorn (Atom/BBC/Electron) models.
The IBM PC was launched in August 1981, and became a huge worldwide hit. Then came the Motorola 68000-based triumvirate -- the Mac, the Atari ST and the Amiga -- in 1984-85, all with mice and graphhical user interfaces, much like the systems we use today.
In the UK, we'd also had the Computers in Schools project (followed by the famous Modems in Cupboards) and a Minister for IT, Kenneth Baker.
I seem to recall that Ken was interviewed by Vic Keegan for the first issue of the Guardian's MicroFutures page in 1983 (when I started writing a weekly column about IT). We launched the Computer Guardian section started in 1985. Hard to imagine that happening if there were no digital devices in homes!
