PAPER: JUST SAY NO

Dick Pountain/16 July 2002/12:30/Idealog 96

I bought a new printer the other day. I only mention this because it's the first I've bought for best part of a decade. My old HP Deskjet 540 still handles what little printing I need, and it only gets switched on about a dozen times a year to print invoices and VAT returns. I'm one of those quaint old-fashioned IT dinosaurs who actually believes in the 'paperless office' and continues to practice it so far as I can: those piles of paper that do clutter up my office were all generated by other people.

Last year I completed a 450,000 word dictionary - over three years work - and never once printed out a single page of it, ever. It went to the publisher on CD, and they eventually sent back printers' proofs. Some people seem outraged when they hear this, as if I were confessing an addiction to tightrope-walking or Russian Roulette. They are the ones who just don't get it, and unfortunately they now seem to be in the majority. Merely mention the paperless office and you'll receive world-weary, cynical sneers about the way that computers have multiplied rather than reduced the amount of paper floating round the office. That is certainly true, but only because many people are too dense, idle or obstructive to use them properly.

Think about this for a moment. If I had printed out my dictionary and sat there contemplating a two-foot high pile of paper, what good would it have done when my computer was destroyed by lightning? Could I have typed it all back in again from the hard copy? Are you mad? (I would have soon been). OCR it all? Possible, but what a fag. What I actually had of course were scores of digital copies of the database on dozens of CDs, which in the event of disaster I could just pop into another computer and continue.

This invincible myth continues to circulate among the computer semi-literate that your data is safer on paper than in electronic digital form. One writer acquaintance for several years printed out every page as he wrote it, and didn't feel safe until he had done so. And indeed he wasn't safe, because he had never learnt how to save a file and was keeping it all in RAM... Then there was that delightful boss/secretary pair that Steve Cassidy described in his column last year, who edited Powerpoint presentations by printing them on a colour laser, exchanging copies, and then scanning them back in: they called Steve when their new 60 gig disk got full up (after about a fortnight). Assuming you manage your digital media sensibly, your data is much more useful and safer inside the computer (or someone's computer), at least in the medium term. There's a whole other argument about the very-long-term durability of digital media, but that's for another column.

Anyhow, I bought a printer last week because I don't have one in Italy (though I have survived for two years without one). Being in Italy simplified the purchase process enormously - no scouring the Web for the best mail order price, simply drive to the massive IperCoop in Arezzo and buy whatever they had in stock. In the electrical goods section I was momentarily diverted by dozens of gorgeous, elegant espresso machines, which were not only infinitely more interesting than the printers but would have been useful every day. However I wrenched myself away and bought the smallest and cheapest printer they had, which turned out to be a Canon S200. It turns out that this beast is USB-only, something I'd never dealt with before, but that suited me fine as I had a spare USB port. What didn't suit me nearly so fine was that after installing the USB drivers, my computer refused to boot.

After a couple of hours of ducking and diving I got to the bottom of what had gone wrong, and it turned out to be quite instructive. It was partially my fault, because not having read the instructions closely enough I had dared to do a really stupid thing - I had plugged the printer into my computer. The instructions, when read very closely, make it clear that under no circumstances must you do this: you have to follow their sequence exactly and only plug the printer in as the very last step. Because USB is two-way and hot-pluggable (unlike the dumb old parallel ports I'm used to) the printer had in effect injected poison into my Windows installation during its illicit connection. Reinstalling the drivers a couple of times fixed this but revealed a second problem, namely that the printer driver was taking several minutes to load. A classic process of elimination revealed that this was due to a bad interaction with Adaptec's DirectCD packet-writing driver, and after wasting an afternoon wrestling with them both I decided that one had to go.

I'd always been aware of the general contempt in which packet-writing is held among my colleagues, but had somehow forced it to work well enough to automate my backup-to-CD-RW system. I decided enough was enough, and uninstalled it. Actually I've dumped CD-RW altogether and now just burn multi-session CD-Rs using EasyCD Creator. I have a cute little printer that prints very nicely indeed, on those rare occasions I need it, and my external CD burner is 100% reliable at last and never hides from plug-and-play the way it sometimes used to. Funny old world innit. Gawd bless, stay bright...