A news company as massive as the New York Times encompasses all things, all ideas–it contains multitudes, to paraphrase Walt Whitman. So, the paper of record could look silly in 1985 publishing a piece that predicted laptops would never really catch on but look brilliant three years earlier pretty much laying out the next several decades of our ever-increasingly digitized world, the triumphs and the fears. From “Study Says Technology Could Transform Society,” an article by Robert Reinhold in the June 14, 1982 edition:
“WASHINGTON— A report commissioned by the National Science Foundation and made public today speculates that by the end of this century electronic information technology will have transformed American home, business, manufacturing, school, family and political life.
The report suggests that one-way and two-way home information systems, called teletext and videotex, will penetrate deeply into daily life, with an effect on society as profound as those of the automobile and commercial television earlier in this century.
It conjured a vision, at once appealing and threatening, of a style of life defined and controlled by videotex terminals throughout the house.
As a consequence, the report envisioned this kind of American home by the year 1998: ‘Family life is not limited to meals, weekend outings, and once a-year vacations. Instead of being the glue that holds things together so that family members can do all those other things they’re expected to do – like work, school, and community gatherings -the family is the unit that does those other things, and the home is the place where they get done. Like the term ‘cottage industry,’ this view might seem to reflect a previous era when family trades were passed down from generation to generation, and children apprenticed to their parents. In the ‘electronic cottage,’ however, one electronic ‘tool kit’ can support many information production trades.’
The report warned that the new technology would raise difficult issues of privacy and control that will have to be addressed soon to ‘maximize its benefits and minimize its threats to society.'”
