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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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