Aucbvax.2260
fa.works
utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!works
Mon Jul 13 04:22:30 1981
Re:  Re: A Quibble or two
>From gaines@RAND-UNIX Mon Jul 13 04:14:52 1981
   .... If using little pieces of paper is more effective than
   using the computer, this indicates that something is very
   wrong in the design of the software.  Either the software
   is good enough to replace paper, which is presumably the
   intent, or somebody blew the design.

This implicitly states the view that paper is going to go away.
I don't believe it.  As computer use increases in offices, I
think that we can expect that the amount of paper shuffled
will substantially decrease.  But paper has its own uses.  It
is easier to scan rapidly through a large report (or a printed
collection of junk messages from the Arpanet) that to do the
same on-line.  It is wonderful to be able to write or draw, in
colors, on a printed page, including on top of the writing.  I
can often find interesting things in a file cabinet when I'm not
sure just where I filed it than I can find things filed on-line
when I am faced with the same degree of uncertainty.  I expect
that the evolution of office work brought on by intensive use of
computer works stations will cause many changes which affect how
and when paper is used, but will not eliminate it.

Incidentally, the one thing really needed is a cheap way to
read in a computer-printed piece of paper, so I don't have to
maintain the corresponding text on-line.  If we had really cheap
large capacity stores so that things could stay on-line forever,
then it would be nice to copy anything printed to a retreivable
place, with the identification automatically printed on the piece
of paper so that if I delete it from my files, I can retreive it
again when I next look at the piece of paper.

Overall, I think we need more progress on getting the paper
and computer worlds to mesh together nicely, in contrast to
the objective of getting rid of paper.



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