Burn the Paperless Office

There's a good light piece in American Heritageabout the "myth of the paperless office"–an unfulfilled utopian ideal of a few decades ago (and a personal favorite of my high school typing teacher who, doubtless displacing her self-hatred, used to go on and on about how typewriters would soon disappear from the face of the Earth).

"One might have well have dreamed a century ago of the typewriter?s making the pencil obsolete," writes Frederick E. Allen, who makes the larger, and important, point that technologies tend to supplement one another (think radio and television).