Save trees

7.4 Save trees

The term Unix guru probably came about because Unix is such an out-of-the-ordinary operating system. People who become experts in Unix tend to be regarded with both awe and suspicion: awe because they have mastered the mysteries of this fascinating computer environment, and suspicion because you wonder if this person might be slightly off his or her rocker to have devoted so much time to an operating system.

The first Unix guru I met was my boss early in my career at a small high-tech firm in southern New Hampshire. Besides preventing many of us from playing Rogue (a popular dungeon game) on company time, he also had responsibility for the daily management of our Unix system. Our Unix system ran on a Digital PDP-11/70, the same PDP-11/70 that had been running another operating system besides Unix before he arrived.

In those days, much programming was done in assembly language. The engineers in our department would spend hours writing and testing code that would be cross-assembled to run on a target machine of a different architecture. "Bit-twiddling" of this sort required paper listings. Lots of them. To debug a program, a person would generate an assembler listing and send it to our fastest line printer where it would appear as a stack of fanfold paper sometimes more than six inches thick. The more senior the programmer, the heftier the listing. If one wanted to gain respect in our shop, one simply had to generate longer listings. Obviously, anyone who could generate that much paper was certainly a hard worker, one worthy of significant compensation at salary review times. Management believed this myth, and we the engineers knew how to play it for all it was worth.

I was walking down the hall one day, laboring under a five-inch thick load of arboreal by-product, when my Unix guru boss stopped me and asked what I was doing with so much paper. "This is my program," I replied. I practically shoved the listing in his face as if to say, "Yes, I'm hard at work. Yessir!"

He grimaced. "You're killing too many trees. Come to my office."

He went straight to his terminal and proceeded to give me a lesson on Unix I'll never forget.

The point he made was this: Once you have printed your data on paper, you have largely lost the ability to manipulate it any further. Data on paper cannot be sorted, moved, filtered, transformed, modified, or anything else as easily as it can on a computer. You cannot search it at the touch of a key. It cannot be encrypted to protect sensitive information.

Do you remember earlier when we said that data that doesn't move is dead data? Paper poses a similar problem for your data. It's simply not possible to move paper data as fast as electronic bits stored on a computer. Therefore, paper data will always be "stale" compared with data kept on a computer. Just ask the publishers of the popular encyclopedias of the past. They are having fits today trying to sell encyclopedias in lovely leather-bound hardcover book form when people can get more timely information from the Internet.

With the growing popularity of fax machines, you may have observed that it is possible to transmit paper pages easily over telephone lines. But what happens to the information on the paper after transmission? It is locked into a medium that limits its usefulness.

Beware of paper. It is a death certificate for your data.