The paper(less) chase.

The Association for Computing Machinery reminded the author of the pursuit of the paperless lifestyle with its choice last week of Hewlett-Packard Co. Labs' senior fellow, Alan Kay as the winner of its Turing Award for 2003. About 35 years ago, Kay envisioned what he called the Dynabook-a device similar to a Tablet personal computer but with better programming tools and with aids that even grade-school children could use to collaborate and learn. Three decades after Kay first imagined replacing books with Dynabooks, U.S. businesses were still spending approximately $1 billion a year designing and printing paper forms, then spending about 30 times that amount on filing, storing and retrieving them. They spent more than twice as much again on maintaining, updating and distributing the documents. If workers could get their jobs done without all that dead-tree debris being painstakingly produced, lovingly stored and laboriously moved around, it would pay for much of the cost of the entire IT apparatus-even if the productivity of the workers who use those documents' content merely stayed the same.