The Paper-Chaste

An article in yesterday's business section points out that the much-ballyhooed "paperless office" and "paperless society" of 30 years ago has turned out to be a pipe dream. I'm amazed it took them that long to figure this out, since I knew right away, i.e. 30 years ago, that it was a crock. To begin with -- and those of you who were around back then, and using computers -- i.e. mainframes -- will remember, the computers of that era, far from using less paper than more traditional techniques, used more -- many times more, in fact. Remember how, for every computing job you frantically thrust into the hands of the geeks who ran the mainframe in the basement (it was always in the basement for some reason, and it was cooled down to cryogenic levels -- but even so, the geeks always wore short-sleeved shirts) you would get a "printout" back on paper wider than a queen-sized bed, with maybe one page actually devoted to your results and about 20 pages devoted to gobbledegook that only the geeks could understand? Not to mention the endless "Snoopy" pictures the geeks would turn out by the score in their spare time. Truly, the mainframe was the best friend the paper companies ever had. Now, with the advent of the PC, things improved a bit. Now one could get printouts on normal, letter-sized paper. But a lot of those printouts had to do with things that were... um... not exactly "job-related", and at the same time the copying machines had morphed from little, slow, pathetic things that sat on a table (remember the "Thermofax" when all it was was a copier?) into things the size of... well, of the old mainframes, filling an entire room and using the paper from an entire forest every fortnight.

But there was more to it than all this, and it's what ultimately killed the "paperless" movement. The fact is, people simply do not trust electrons. Are you really going to trust your data, and your text files, and spreadsheets, or anything else, to a bunch of scurrying little electronic charges that no one has ever actually seen? -- especially when we know how easy it is for them to get sidetracked, and distorted, and swallowed up in hyperspace. No, there is something warm and secure about paper. You can see it, touch it, smell it. When we used to get power outages in my agency -- a common occurrence in the summer especially -- the lucky ones were the people who not only had "backup", i.e. duplicate files on floppies or in a stand-alone (non-network) PC, but who had actual "paper" for many of their files. They could keep working! The anguished screams echoing through the corridors of the building were all coming from the poor chumps who had believed the "IT" people -- that, well of course, you can always retrieve your files, and they will never die or be destroyed, and they will always be there when you need them. So when the electronic monolith -- mainframe or "distributed system" -- turned into the god that failed, paper always saved the day. And it was good old human instinct and common sense that was behind it.