While the column talks about CD life Cecil says "I may drag one out to show them, as I might show them what a rotary-dial telephone and a typewriter look like, but unless they get into antiquities they'll never own one."
Here I object. Typewriters still have a valid use. I own one purchased in the 90's, I know there's one at the office also. These aren't an attempt to deny the modern age--I normally use WordPerfect, not a typewriter. However, the computer doesn't make a very good tool for filling in a form unless you do enough of them to carefully program the form's layout. For doing odd forms that need to be nice the typewriter is still the best tool.
There are software specifically designed for filling out forms. It’s basically the same process Netbrian described, but some of the process is automated. It works well enough. It’s essential for us Japanese because there is no such thing as a Japanese typewriter. (Though for the same reason, hand-written forms are still acceptable in most cases.)
One advantege of typewriters still remains - you can fill out a multi-part (carbon copy) form. You can’t do that on an inkjet or laser printer. Dot matrix printers and daisy-wheel printers can do it, but those are as rare as typewriters these days.
Typewriters are quite handy. The next time your computer breaks and you are upset at it, just try writing a 20 page document in a typewriter. It instantly cures any angst you had towards your computer.
It is kinda funny - technology often makes things more complicated, until it reaches a point where it removes the complication. Printing a label for a single envelope takes much longer on a computer than a typewriter, but longer on a typewriter than by hand. New lines of products for computers designed to assist in notetaking and the like all strive to emulate the basic functions of a pad of paper and a pencil - and fail, much like e-books have thus far. But eventually someone will develop a light, portable tablet-PC that can recognize handwriting and all that, and stay connected reliably to a wireless network, and it will become much more handy.
Voice control technology is much the same. They say much of it is targetted at office use, but that is obviously asinine, based on the amount of noice made by human speech. The use of voice control will be in more hands-free operation, and in a more linguistic setting - the computer listens for the keyword (say, a name) and then asks for what you want - like “Search for a document named cecil”… since the user is sitting at the keyboard anyway (they have to use the mouse and keyboard quite frequently in these programs, even in the most advanced speech-to-text and voice command), the use is pretty limited in most settings. Mostly to system commands and configurations. Which means it is more likely to be seen in a high-tech microwave than a PC.
But scr4, who needs a multi-page carbon form when printers and photocopiers can run off all the copies you need electronically? The carbon forms are vestiges of the old way that just haven’t died yet.
Where I used to work (government) they used to use carbon forms. Then computers became predominant enough that everyone had one on their desk. The carbon forms were finally replaced. For a number of years, they still had some in case you wanted to hand write your paperwork, but once they were all used up it was just easier to print out blank forms to fill in by hand, if you so desired. Why? Sometimes in the field you might not have your PC handy. Or a short one-line description task, you might not want to go back to your office in a building off site. With photocopiers, you get better copiers and less mess. Who needs carbons?
Some things, like invoices, are preferred in carbon copies as a presumed check against jiggery-pokery, and it is now popular to use invisible printing for payroll checks. It’s been a few years, but the last time I worked on a mainframe, despite its having a laser printer that produced four of five pages per second, we still kept a much slower one-page-per-second impact printer (a print-band type) right next to it for things that had to be in carbons.
Lexmark, for one, still keeps dot-matrix printers in its product line. Interestingly, they are all named “Lexmark Forms nnnn”. IBM announced a whole new family of impact printers only last October.
Apparently none of you guys have ever heard of PDFs. You download forms online, open them in Adobe Acrobat Reader, fill in the fields using the software, and print to your printer.
In San Jose, Costa Rica, the secretaries that worked at the courthouse went on strike in 1991. The reason for such was the intentions of the government to replace typewriters for computers. Of course the ladies didn’t succeeded on trying to stop progress. They probably thought that the new “evil machines” were going to bite them!
P.s. I know my English is bad so don’t waist time commenting about it.