Newsbytes News Network, called "an Associated Press for tech-information junkies"[1] was founded in May, 1983 in San Francisco, California by broadcast journalist Wendy Woods Gorski, who remained editor in chief for the 19 years.
[5] Wendy Woods Gorski had the idea to create an online publication out of what she was already writing daily for her broadcast news position in San Francisco.
Newsbytes officially launched in 1983 as a "user publishing" feature on an online service called The Source, owned by Reader’s Digest, based in McLean, Virginia.
It was infused with her being and when I joined her in 1985 I took that lesson to heart, putting my personality into my own work from Atlanta", said Dana Blankenhorn, one of the service’s early writers.
[7] By the end of the first year Steve Gold, a journalist in Sheffield, England, joined the company and contributed European technology news.
Newsbytes stories were aimed at a broad cross-section of both business and consumer users of information technology, which contributed to the service’s wide appeal.
[8] During its nearly two decades of existence, Newsbytes News Network stories were syndicated to some 180 magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and online services worldwide.
A Toronto-based company called Clarinet prepared the wire feed for Unix systems that went directly to corporate information technologists.
Nels Johnson, a San Francisco-based programmer, created software that allowed PC owners to process the news feed offline and display headlines or full stories.
Innovations included 15-minute delayed quotes for the stock price of publicly held companies via links in the stories, complete keyword search of archives, and additional news feeds from The Business Wire.