One possible advantage of paper is that it is calm:
Paper is calm.
It looked for a while that paper could be augmented, calmly, with hypertext, which allowed cross-referencing, something paper wasn't very good at. But look at a typical corperate web-page now, it appears to be in a state of constant alarm, like a vietnam veteran running knife in hand, screaming, through the University Library.
WordPerfect for DOS emulated one application of paper well toom the interface was almost as simple as holding a pen. Press this for bold, that for italic, that for underline, no more complex than changing writing implement in the real world. There's a few things you couldn't do, who cares, this wasn't paper, but it was as calm as paper. Now you've got Word for Windows version 8. Saying that your wordprocessor is more like paper because it contains a white rectangle on which symbols appear is rediculous. Buttons appear from nowhere with bizzare brightly lit symbols on them, menus, status bars all kinds of things demanding to be pressed, pulled down, popped up, selected, and activated. This isn't calm paper, it's like walking up to a piece of paper and having to use it via the controls of a VCR-timer-from-hell.
The extract above was written in 1997. I'm not sure whether things have gotten better or worse in the last ten years.
-- David Magda (email), July 18, 2007
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