This is the Langley Advance's 80th year of operation.

Right now we're celebrating alongside the Greater Langley Chamber of Commerce - the organization which is at least to some extent responsible for our existence.

It's customary, when businesses hit auspicious milestones like an 80th anniversary, to make predictions about future directions and successes.

But I'm not making any such predictions... or at least, not many. And if I do take a little bit of a look into possible futures, I'll try to couch my visions in terms that I hope won't make me look stupid a few years down the road, when they turn out to be... well... stupid.

Here's a case in point. I found this clever little soothsayer's delight tacked onto the end of a story in a special edition I helped crank out in celebration of the Langley Advance's 50th anniversary:

"Perhaps 50 years from now, laser ray computer electronics will make the 1981 method of putting out the Langley Advance look as quaint as the 1931 system looks now."

Actually, it took about four years for the "laser ray and computer electronics" to change the newspaper industry, and it has been in a constant state of flux ever since.

Forget "laser ray and computer electronics" - what we totally missed 30 years ago was the nascent Internet, quietly humming already in the background, sending signals between and among universities and researchers.

Even those university scientists had no idea yet about the communications explosion that their clever substitute for inter-office memos would unleash on the world.

And certainly no one in the newspaper industry was then prepared for the amazing changes that it would wreak on us.

Sure, I recall that there was already talk in 1981 of "black box" devices that you would be able to attach to your television set, allowing you to download and print your own newspaper - or just the pages you were interested in - right in your own living room.

As fascinating as the possibilities seemed then, only those of us who also had a penchant for science fiction entertained any such outlandish notions.

And even then, I don't believe any of us really seriously contemplated the depth of possibilities that our musings offered, because after all, any future that contained them as realilty wouldn't include us - we'd all certainly be dead by then.

Well, pretty much all I can say about that now is: oops.

Indeed, our future of television mounted newspaper printers never arrived.

We have leap-frogged light years beyond the black boxes.

"Laser ray" technology was quickly supplanted by web pages and blogs and citizen journalism and myriad cellphone apps.

Amazingly, however, as I look through the very first pages of the Langley Advance, from 80 years ago, I see that, in some respects, the internet is bringing community journalism full circle, right back to the community, right back into the hands of the readers themselves.

Eighty years ago, a housewife in Coghlan or County Line or Sperling or Harmsworth - or any of a number of Langley communities - could pen a few notes, send them to the Advance editor, and have them distributed for everyone who cared to read.

They were often mundane notes, like who was visiting whom, or how somebosy's nephew was doing in school in the city.

And each of those items was about exactly the size of a tweet.

Visit Bob Groeneveld's blog, Editor's Notes, at http://tiny.cc/v7b94 at www.langleyadvance.com