The Tech (newspaper)

"The Tech", first published on November 16, 1881, is the oldest and largest campus newspaper at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Editions are published on Tuesday and Friday throughout the academic year, daily during freshman orientation period, once a week during January, and occasionally over the summer. Printed copies are distributed throughout the MIT campus on the morning of publication.

"The Tech" became the first newspaper published on the World Wide Web, as stated on its [http://www-tech.mit.edu/ webpage] : "The world's first newspaper on the Web, est. 1993." Earlier, StarText, the "Fort Worth Star-Telegram"'s videotex system which displayed newspaper content on computer screens, began in 1982 in Fort Worth, Texas (but did not go on the Internet until 1996). In 1987, the "Middlesex News" (Framingham, Massachusetts) launched Fred the Computer, a single-line BBS system used to preview the next day's edition and later to organize the newspaper's past film reviews.

Nearly every published Tech is available online and most issues are accessible as PDF files. For example, the first issue ever printed: [http://www-tech.mit.edu/V1/PDF/N1.pdf "The Tech" (November 16, 1881)] . Edited by Arthur W. Walker, it was printed by Alfred Mudge & Son, Printers, located at 34 School Street in Boston. Today "The Tech" is printed by Charles River Publishing in Charlestown. For a period in the 1990s, "The Tech" was printed by Mass Web Printing Company, a unit of Phoenix Media/Communications Group, the publisher of the "Boston Phoenix". "The Tech's" archives are [http://www-tech.mit.edu/browse.html available online] .

Notable Alumni

*Karen W. Arenson - Education writer for "The New York Times".
*Simson Garfinkel - Writer for "Technology Review," "Wired," and the "Boston Globe".
*Arthur Hu - Writer for Asian Week. His columns focused on affirmative action and the increasing number of Asian American students in the 1980s and were quoted by Thomas Sowell.
*Karen Kaplan - Science writer for the "Los Angeles Times".
*Larry Stark (pseudonym Charles Foster Ford) - Famed Boston theater critic. Stark started writing for "The Tech" in the years 1962-64. Stark's review of Arthur Kopit's "Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Momma's Hung You in the Closet, and I'm Feeling So Sad" in [http://www-tech.mit.edu/archives/VOL_083/TECH_V083_S0007_P007.pdf "The Tech" (February 13, 1963)]
*Keith J. Winstein - Staff reporter for "The Wall Street Journal".

External links

* [http://www-tech.mit.edu/ The Tech's website]