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Comment by asolove | Hacker News Reader

Alright folks, tell me about how great this whole "computer" thing is when you throw out your pen and paper. Maybe I'll get on the internet after you all stop talking to people face-to-face.

Doesn't follow. The question is how technology is affecting people's lives, and the answer, for now, is: immediacy and ease of use. For you, the iPad is a Unix machine with no file system and no shell. For a normal person, it is a magical way to share high-quality photos and talk with people across the world. That may not be very high tech, but it's currently holding together human relationships and families that otherwise wouldn't, and ultimately that's what is making an impact.

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Yeah, but we don't say that we are in the 'post pen-and-paper era'...

... because pens and paper are still around, and still useful for lots of things, even though some of the things they were used for in the past are now done on the computer.

Just like PCs are still around, and still useful for lots of things, even though some of the things they were used for in the past are now done on a tablet.

This is true, but I wouldn't bat an eye at the phrase "post-mainframe era," though of course there are still plenty of mainframes doing useful work.

But I would say in the 'post mainframe era,' we've gone from a time when most computers were mainframes to a time when most computers are not. Thus talking about the 'post pc era,' implies (in my opinion) that the vast majority of people will only have a table.

Surely that would be when the vast majority of computers are not PCs, not that the vast majority of people only have a tablet. Given the ubiquity of devices in the average home that have microprocessors, that do computing jobs that PCs can do, that aren't actually PCs, we've been there for a while.

Now if he'd said that we were in the tablet era, that's another thing.

>Yeah, but we don't say that we are in the 'post pen-and-paper era'...

Sure we do. http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=paperless&y...

But you didn't graph the phrase "post pen-and-paper era" so I don't understand your point. The previous poster's point was that we don't claim that pen and paper are dead. Are there countless of uses of the world "paperless?" Sure. What is the connection? I tried to graph "can't find anymore paper because no one uses it" but it didn't yield any results.

I use pen and paper maybe 3 times a year and I could certainly live completely without pen and paper at this point.

The computer made a lot of things obsolete. For example, typewriters, carbon paper, and those calculators that printed to roles of paper.

Tablets won't make anything obsolete, let alone desktop computers.

"those calculators that printed to roles of paper" are called adding machines, or "10 keys". They are still around in a virtual form.

If you have a full size keyboard with the number pad on the right side, in Windows, you can open Calculator|View|History, and you have a digital adding machine right on your computer.

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