No one in the Minneapolis Message Mill Network from the Winter of 79/80 to September of 80, ever heard of an online edition.

Considering you'd have had to hook up with a duplex modem, it had to be a really specialized class of subscribers, and probably cost a pretty penny.

It was not general knowledge.
It wasn't even inside knowledge.
But somewhere, someone had access to
the IBM's or the Cybers to do it.

This is for an elite class of subscribers.

CIS wasn't actually connected to the Internet at that time, so "Internet" isn't the right term.

I think the Compuserve project was dead long before I arrived at the Strib in 1985, but I knew about it. When we planned Star Tribune Online, the project was automatically covered by the Newspaper Guild contract. That issue had been settled in a brief strike around 1981.

Because of longstanding noncommercial use policies, the Internet action really didn't start until 1993. Pretty much all consumer online activity before then was on proprietary services.

In 1993, I put together a capital request to hook the Star Tribune's internal network to the Internet and put email and Gopher clients on every desktop. We installed Minuet, a U of M software product.

The Star Tribune was the second daily newspaper in the world with an Internet connection.

According to Internic records, startribune.com was registered Jan. 13. 1994, and seatimes.com (Seattle Times) Jan. 19, 1994. Houston's Chron.com beat us all by years, having been registered in April 1990.

None of those projects was focused on publishing online -- they all were aimed at providing Internet access for newsroom and other newspaper personnel.

The project to publish Star Tribune Online started later in 1994. I moved from print to online full-time on April Fool's Day. We announced Star Tribune Online in June of that year:

http://tinyurl.com/anq2v8

The initial Star Tribune Online service was dialup-based. It provided Internet mail and a proprietary client that was way better than any Web browser -- when it wasn't busy crashing. You had to run Windows, and you had to pay something like $15/month.

Netscape was quickly added to the service, and the Star Tribune was accessible through the net if you installed the Interchange client.

We went into "beta test" mode late in 1994, launched commercially in early 1995, and announced in December 1995 that we were shutting down the proprietary service, moving to the Web and free access.

By then, the Twin Cities had gone from one (mr.net) to over a hundred Internet service providers.

I'm particularly proud of the online staff we assembled in 1994 -- some of whom are still around. Out of ten people, we had two Pulitzer winners, and I enjoyed pointing out that the print newsroom only had one.

We pioneered community publishing, providing tools to churches and community organizations. We embraced conversation with integrated forums. We built databases, interactive applications, personalized tools, and all sorts of things that weren't generally available on the Internet for years.

I was at the Tribune in 1981. Although I was not directly involved in this project, I did have some conversations about CompuServe and other early electronic news experiments with the Star and Tribune's research director. The Star and Tribune was actively involved in a lot of innovative work with computers in the late '70s and early '80s and the CompuServe project was just one example of this. Another example was the assignment of a Tribune photographer as early as the late 1970s to keep an eye on digital photography. Yes, there were very crude digital cameras a long time ago; I saw one demonstrated in 1987 (the photos it took looked like colorized postcards from the early 1900s).

I did the first newsroom testing of an electronic layout system for a project team led by Rodgers Adams and including Paul Brainerd. The prototype system worked but rather than go further with it the company turned over what it had learned to Atex. Brainerd went on to become a vice president of Atex and then went out on his own to create the first consumer pc layout application: PageMaker.

There was a lot going on with computer-based news dissemination at that time. CompuServe was just one of a number of projects. In Texas, there was StarText; a small daily in Indiana had its own system; Knight Ridder was trying out Viewtron on audiences in Coral Gables, Fla., and Santa Monica, Calif., to name just a few of them. Viewtron was a Videotex system that required users to buy their own terminals, which cost $1,000. The system used graphics (they were blocky) and provided some consumer services in addition to news.

In England, folks were developing a system, Teletext, that inserted bulletin-like news items in the vertical blanking interval in television signals.

In France, the government introduced a national Videotex system, Minitel, that was the most sophisticated of them all and came closest to anticipating the kind of content that the World Wide Web made possible a decade later.

Hello, Larry and Steve!

Larry Pearson and I worked together from 1969 until he left for Alaska in the mid-1980s. Steve Yelvington and I, when both of us were on the copy desk, spent (non-deadline) hours talking about programming our home computers. I'm delighted to see their comments here -- Steve became a Web guru with a national following after getting the pioneering Startribune.com up and running, as he describes; Larry is retired from the University of Alaska faculty and the Anchorage Daily News.

I also worked on the Atex pagination system in its early days; Rodge Adams showed me his breadboard prototype, and I was in the first training sessions. Later I was used in troubleshooting by the techs because I had a knack for crashing the system through lame-brained mistakes. They'd call me down to the second floor to try out software and hardware upgrades.

Larry is correct in referring to the Star AND Tribune. The merger came in April 1982.

In September 1981, I went on strike for 28 days with the Newspaper Guild. Our issue was that we had a contract clause stipulating that a staff member would receive a 25 percent share of any revenue from resale of his/her work -- a common example was the $100 that Reader's Digest occasionally paid for picking up our front-page "Almanac" joke. The company didn't want to apply that to writing that might be picked up for distribution by computer through the new, experimental arrangement with Compuserve. I worked on the Guild's Information Committee, researching such things as Knight Ridder's project in Florida. And we were planning a major fund-raising event featuring Ed Asner ("Lou Grant"). Meanwhile Larry Pearson, a news editor, had to work in the skeleton crew of managers putting out a skinny Tribune -- and his wife worked in the Guild office.

That's my perspective on the strike related to a first stab at an "e-edition" -- but in the long view, I think we may not have walked out over that issue if the mailers hadn't gone out first. The mailroom had been a labor-intensive operation employing many workers to stuff inserts and bundle papers, but in 1980 the company installed machinery that took the place of many workers and cut down overtime opportunities. It's my recollection that proposed technology-related changes in their union contract caused their strike. Our dispute occurred at the same time, and we hit the street together.

How things changed in a little more than a dozen years, and how lucky we were to have Steve Yelvington on board!

Incidentally, former Minnpost puzzle columnist Al Sicherman, a beloved Strib food writer and humor columnist until his retirement, was a key figure in development of the first computer editing system at the Star and Tribune in, as Larry mentions, the early 1970s. Al has an electrical engineering degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology and came to Minnesota to work for Control Data. Being a computer-savvy journalist, he was on the search committee to find a vendor and was one of the wizards who taught us all to use the Atex system when it arrived.

Ain't it fun to babble about the good old days?

Great to see some names I remember here. Just for the record: The strike was in the fall of 1980, not 1981. I was on the Guild bargaining committee that called the strike. Like most parents, I carbon date events from what my children were doing at the time. My younger daughter was born in June 1980 while we were in negotiations and spent a lot of time nursing while I was sitting at the bargaining table during the strike.

I was the editor for the 1981 Strib online project on CompuServe.

There were probably less than 5K personal computers in the Twin Cities in those days -- mainly Apple IIs, TRS-80s and Commodores. The online folks had 300bps modems. As I recall, the CompuServe text-only output was 40-characters in width.

The Strib "product" on CompuServe was called "TriStar Video News" and the content was some local and national news, plus a special focus on technology news and features (we had a computer game reviewer).

The highlight stories we posted during the project were the Reagan assassination attempt and the introduction of the IBM PC. (I think we beat the Wash Post and the NY Times -- other CompuServe participants -- on the assassination story; had it on line just a few minutes after it hit the AP wire. Mainly luck.

You're right, Linda! I'm mortified --I KNEW it was 1980 and mistyped. My second daughter was 1 year old, and Ed Asner remarked on her crying in the background while we were talking on the phone.

... Back again (had a meeting and some work to do) with a few more semi-interesting things about the AP/CompuServe Project, as it was known.

- This was not the "Internet"; it was a dial-up (modem) service -- CompuServe was a huge time-sharing service (pay to access our mainframes' applications) with positions in numerous industries. It was not unlike the "cloud" services that are in vogue today.

- Linda Picone is right -- this was after the Guild strike over "residual pay" in 1980. (I, as a Guild member, probably got the editor job because of the strike).

- CompuServe users paid by the minute (based on something like $5/hr). There were a few people (almost exclusively men) spending hundreds each month on the service, mainly playing text-based interactive, multi-user games.

- The newspapers got at least weekly and monthly usage statistics for their "sites" -- measured in minutes.

- The NY Times and W Post always were far ahead in usage -- from every where in the country. "TriStar VideoNews" generally was third or fourth, as I recall. (The technology content helped us.)

- At least one of the papers -- probably the Post -- pushed some of their classified ad categories onto their site (real estate and (maybe) jobs and (maybe) auto). There was no "search" capability on CompuServe (CIS) at the time, so you had to go through layers and layers of menus (10-ish entries per page/screen) to get to individual ads. (A "page" was 40 characters wide by 24-ish lines.)

- There were some feeble attempts at display advertising -- try building a display ad for Dayton's (er, Bloomingdale's) in MS-Windows' NotePad and you'll get the idea -- that went nowhere, as I recall.

- The papers that dumped their entire print content to their CompuServe sites were among the least successful in getting online usage.

We (the Strib) left the project after about nine months, as I recall -- there just wasn't a real future in it and not much more to learn (diminishing returns).

What I took away from the experiment (and shared with management) was that in an online environment:

- Users seeing news would tend to gravitate to the "major" (national/international) news sources such as the Times and Post, leaving local/regional newspapers in the dust.

- Users would tend to gravitate toward their personal interests (in our case, technology, computers and gaming), leaving general-interest news sources in the dust.

- Online classified ads had significant potential, if there was a search capability (keyword or Boolean, which was a big debate in those days -- Google and Craigslist took care of that).

- Online display advertising required a per-view metric for pricing (assuming you could actually do a reasonable display ad).

- The "cost-of-entry" to the online world was something on the order of $3K for a computer, plus usage fees of $30-70 a month for minimal online time.

After the project ('82), I moved to the corporate staff (from a newsroom/Guild position) as "Videotex Services Manager" -- mainly focused on what the then-emerging "new electronic media" would mean to the paper.

In that role, I tried to keep pushing the idea that technology would overtake the "print edition" (videotex was the technology of the day), but I was never able to generate a real commitment to the future and I left the company in 1985 for the technology world.

Side note: There's a great history/timeline of the newspaper/technology collision by David Shedden on PoynterOnline (http://poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=125651).

The key historical moment for folks following the ups and downs of the Strib is 1997-98, when Cowles Media sold the paper to McClatchy -- and why. (see: http://cronkite.asu.edu/mcguireblog/?p=96 and http://blogs.mspmag.com/brianlambert/2009/01/ad-man-and-former-strib-boss-r.html)

A couple of comments from Strib executives keep popping back into my head:

At the beginning of the AP/CompuServe experiment, senior executive Otto Silha encouraged me to "borrow" as many ideas as possible from the other newspapers involved in the project. And at about the same time, Associate Publisher (title may be wrong) Chris Burns declared that newspapers are not in the business of developing software applications (we let vendors do the software).

In retrospect, they both were terribly wrong.

The AP/CompuServe experiment (like AOL, Viewtron and many other efforts after it) was based on the historical premise that big/established companies would control the "digital printing press"; that has not turned out to be the case, as we all know -- but someone does control online searching....

I like the way things are, but I miss what the newspaper industry could have turned into -- and mourn its demise.

This is fascinating stuff. A great history lesson!

I got Star Tribune Online in 1995 but never actually tried it. The box just sat around for a while and the more I looked at it, the more it came to symbolize for me how quickly things can change in Internet time.

I've held onto it and keep it in my office as a reminder of just that. I've been meaning to upload some photos of the packaging but never got around to it but now I've got an excuse: http://e-strategyblog.com/2009/01/star-tribune-online/

Thanks for all your comments; this should go on Wikipedia somewhere.

What a detailed recollection from Steve Poulter, my old boss at the Strib's 1981 TriStar Video News! I had the best part-time job in town that year, as copy editor writing headlines and summaries for the stories we posted to CompuServe. The project staff also included several news assistants and a marketing person, all supported by a really incredible tech team. Our out-of-the-way office behind the Strib cafeteria had an Apple II that let us check the user experience. As you can see in the video, at the now-forgotten but then-spiffy speed of 300 bits per second, the "user experience" was reading line by scrolling line. Even so, in those smudgy green pixels you could see the future.