Electronic Paper Could have Worked Like This
December 26th, 2007
For those of you out there who aren’t big fans of electronic paper devices like the Amazon Kindle and Sony’s e-Reader, just be thankful that we didn’t end up in an alternative universe where this was the way you’d receive your daily newspaper.
The guys over at Modern Mechanix dug up this priceless gem of a photo from the June 1970 issue of Popular Science. It showed a prototype for a newspaper facsimile printer, dubbed the “Electronic newsboy”. Toshiba described the printer as a device which could crank out one double-sided news page every six minutes and would sell for about $300 (with inflation, that would be a bit over $1600 today).
It looks a bit like a microwave oven gone berserk to me. I wonder if it printed the movie section when you pressed the popcorn button.
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Categories: Retro Weird Science
Tags: 1970s japan news old paper popular science printer toshiba
with inflation… ?
with inflation… ?
that item would be cheaper today than back then
e.g. cpu’s back then vs now
Six minutes per page is blazing fast for those mornings when you dress, brush, and run out the door, grabbing the newspaper along the way. Lets say 20 pages, 2 at a time. 10p x 6m = 1 hour, and that seems like a conservative page count.
You would need it to automatically receive an hour or two before you wake, so you could just collate and go. Which I highly doubt the machine could support. Just a thought…