Goodbye, printing

The ability to print has been part of computing for ages. It's been with us since the mainframe era, when it was necessary for developers (to get the results of their compile jobs) and businesspeople (to get the reports needed to run the business).

But printing is not part of the mobile/cloud era. Oh, one can go through various contortions to print from a tablet, but practically no one does. (If any of my Gentle Readers does print from a tablet or smartphone, you can consider yourself a rare bird.)

Printing was really sharing.

Printing served three purposes: to share information (as a report or a memo), to archive data, or to get a bigger picture (larger than a display terminal).

Technology has given us better means of sharing information. With the web and mobile, we can send an e-mail, we can post to Facebook or Twitter, we can publish on a blog, we can make files available on web sites... We no longer need to print our text on paper and distribute it.

Archiving was sharing with someone (perhaps ourselves) in the future. It was a means of storing and retrieving data. This, too, can be handled with newer technologies.

Getting the big picture was important in the days of "glass TTY" terminals, those text-only displays of 24 lines with 80 characters each. Printouts were helpful because they offered more text at one view. But now displays are large and can display more than the old printouts. (At least one page of a printout, which is what we really looked at.)

The one aspect of printed documents which remains is that of legal contracts. We rely on signatures, something that is handled easily with paper and not so easily with computers. Until we change to electronic signatures, we will need paper.

But as a core feature of computer systems, printing has a short life. Say goodbye!