“Constant tinkering": reporters pioneered portable computer use

The study’s findings challenge the common misconception that remote work is a recent development. In fact, reporters have been working remotely since the dawn of modern journalism, covering the world from outside the newsroom using automobile, telegraph, radio and telephone.

“It’s a profession that has always been mobile,” said De Maeyer. “Reporters have to go out into the field while staying in contact with the newsroom.”

In this sense, the advent of portable computers in the 1970s didn’t mean a break with tradition. “Rather, it was the continuation of a long tradition,” she said. “So journalists were a natural market for the manufacturers of the first laptops.”

This explains why some of the earliest portable computers were designed specifically for the press. One example is the Teleram P-1800, introduced in 1975—six years before the Osborne 1, often cited as the first laptop.

The P-1800 was created to meet the needs of the New York Times, whose reporters previously had to dictate their stories, which were then transcribed manually.

In the study, the P-1800 is described as resembling “a small blue suitcase that measured about a foot-and-a-half by a foot by a half-foot. It had a freestanding keyboard and a seven-inch, TV-like cathode ray tube screen…. When connected to a telephone’s earpiece via acoustic coupler, the P-1800 could send about 300 words per minute.”

The P-1800 was popular in its day: by 1976, some 50 daily newspapers were using it, including the New York Times as the Los Angeles Times, as well as the Associated Press and the New Yorker magazine, which bought a 35-per-cent interest in Teleram.

Other devices not specifically designed for news media also came to be widely used by journalists, including the 1983 Tandy TRS-80, which weighed barely two kilograms and ran on standard AA batteries.

The Tandy’s ruggedness and simplicity made it a staple in newsrooms for over a decade. A reporter with the San Antonio Express-News recalled leaving his TRS-80 under a malfunctioning window air conditioner, which soaked it with water: “I freaked out, naturally, but just turned the thing upside down and drained the water out. The next day, the machine worked the same as always.”

The study also examined the marketing rhetoric around these early portable computers—and the messy realities it concealed. Manufacturers promised journalists they could capture and transmit the “original keystrokes” of their stories, leaving no room for transcription errors or interventions from other news workers in their copy.

"Introducing a New Freedom of the Press," a 1979 ad for the Teleram 2277 proclaimed , for example. Observed De Maeyer: “Trade journals and industry publications struck a decidedly optimistic tone, much like today’s discourse on AI."

But this so-called freedom masked a harsh reality: technological progress meant management could quietly eliminate entire categories of workers, such as transcribers, linotype operators and typesetters.

“An article from that era bluntly stated that computers transmitted news stories ‘almost instantly, with no back talk, as may come from some old salty linotype operator of yore’,” De Maeyer related. “The voices of these displaced workers are completely absent from the archives we examined. It’s a significant gap in the documentation.” 

De Maeyer pointed out that prior to the emergence of mobile computing in the 1970s, newsrooms experienced sustained growth driven by a highly specialized division of labour. By mid-century, it was not uncommon for a single newspaper to employ hundreds of staff.

The advent of portable computers reversed this trend. “Many skills just quietly disappeared from newsrooms without anyone talking about it,” she said. “It remained in the shadows.”

Memories tinged with nostalgia

Early experiences with these technologies were often frustrating. In addition to Gagnon’s struggles at La Presse, De Maeyer found many accounts of the daily tinkering and workarounds required to make the devices work and to file a story.

For example, a reporter covering Pope John Paul II’s visit to New York City in 1979 called her Texas Instruments Silent 700 an “albatross”: “It’s heavy and cumbersome and always need[s] a three-point electrical outlet and a phone in close proximity. A couple of times it failed to transmit. Once a fuse blew, but fortunately a guy from ITT on the press plane helped me out. It seems to me it’d be easier just to call in a story.”

“But despite the frustrations, most of the journalists we met look back on that era with fondness and nostalgia,” said De Maeyer. “They spoke of becoming attached to those finicky computers. They were pioneers.”

The pressure to get the news out faster, the ingenuity needed to work around technical glitches, and the adrenaline of working in the field have all settled into a collective memory tinged with pride.

Some of the early devices certainly deserved the affection. The TRS-80, or “Trash 80,” enabled a New York reporter at a 1993 plane crash to file a story from the scene over an early cellphone. Despite the weak signal, the story made it through and was printed the next day.

De Maeyer considers journalism an exemplary case study for understanding how technological transitions occur in a gradual, contradictory and socially unequal manner. 

“These changes were not linear or interconnected,” she noted. “There were many small inventions. The story was more chaotic than we think.” 

Journalists didn’t simply adopt ready-made technologies; they helped design them, test them and define their uses.

These findings challenge the idea that remote work is a recent trend, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, said De Maeuer. In fact, reporters have been filing stories from hotel rooms since the 1970s, navigating the same mix of freedom, constraint and ambivalence that we know today.

“Working away from the office has a long history, and it was reporters and editors who led the way—for better or for worse,” concluded De Maeyer.