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, Wednesdays during January, and about once a month 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 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: 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 Mass Web Printing Company, a unit of Phoenix Media/Communications Group, the publisher of the Boston Phoenix. From 2000-2009, The Tech was printed by Charles River Publishing in Charlestown and briefly by Saltus Press in Worcester, after Saltus acquired Charles River Publishing.
The Tech archives are available online.
[edit] Notable alumni
- Karen W. Arenson - Education writer for The New York Times.
- O. Reid Ashe, Jr. - Chief Operating Officer of Media General.
- Simson L. 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. They were quoted by Thomas Sowell.
- Tom Huang - Assistant Managing Editor for The Dallas Morning News.
- Karen Kaplan - Science writer for the Los Angeles Times.
- James R. Killian, Jr. - 10th president of MIT.
- Harry Ward Leonard - electrical engineer and inventor.
- Patrick Joseph McGovern, Jr. - the chairman and founder of International Data Group (IDG)
- Norman D. Sandler - White House correspondent of United Press International.
- 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 The Tech (February 13, 1963).
- Len Tower Jr. - Founding Board Member, Free Software Foundation and activist with the GNU Project.
- Keith J. Winstein - Staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal.
[edit] See also
- Ergo, another student-run campus newspaper
