Is it any surprise that print is dying? Not for newspapers. In fits and starts since the 1970s and 1980s, they (and others) have been looking to go electronic but they screwed it up. Watch!



Ceefax, BBC's "teletext" service, got its start in the 1970s.



In 1981, KRON, a San Francisco TV station, reported on how the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner were both putting their papers online. Cost of the online version: $10, versus 20 cents for a print copy. Hey, that sounds good — for the newspapers, anyway!



Newspaper chain Knight-Ridder had a service called Viewtron which helped kids "learn how to think and be logical." Sort of like YouTube today, right? It cost $39.95 a month.



In the 1980s, there was Prodigy, an online service which had sports scores before the newspapers.



And then there was QuantumLink, a service which later became AOL and bought Time Warner in a $160 billion deal, before it became worth almost nothing.