Gary figured that magnetic storage had, or would shortly, become as cheap as paper storage. He wanted to see what the experience of dealing only with electronic documents would be like. So he hired some grad students, equipped them with (then) state of the art scanners, and proceeded to have everything he read - newspapers, magazines, books, bills and junk mail among other things - scanned to his hard drive. He read everything on either his laptop or desktop Mac.

Gary spent at least a month doing this, as I recall. He told me that reading long documents on a computer was not as bad it sounded. He recommended that I buy a novel from Hypercard developer Voyager (I bought William Gibson's cyberpunk trilogy and read it on a Duo laptop at our friend's Mendocino ranch - it wasn't as bad as I feared, as Gary said).

Anyway, reason for this trip down memory lane is that last night I set up our Mac Mini with trusty VueScan software, and am now scanning incoming bills, recipes clipped from the Chronicle, Fry's receipts, product documentation and other incoming paper to the terabyte array.

Magnetic storage is now a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper than when Gary performed his experiment, and a lot of the stuff that used to come in the mail - financial statements, nespaers, magazines et al. - are available online as PDF and HTML pages, thus skipping even the scan step. As a result, an older, inexpensive Canon scanner is handling the chore at the moment, though I'm considering a faster model, if the volume goes up.

Adobe Acrobat Pro does essentially a perfect job of capturing the text of scanned docs via OCR, which means the text can be indexed and searched (a feature not available for paper). So 11 years later we're moving into Gary's new world for the sake of convenience, not experiment, though I'm having a hard time putting the scanned paper copies in the recycling...
Comments 9:39:51 PM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures