When I bought my first computer, I bought two printers at the same time: an Okidata 320 dot matrix printer for fast, everyday printing and the other was a Diablo daisy wheel (remember those?) for correspondence that needed to look nice. The daisy wheel printer was the outgrowth of that same technology that was used in electric typewriters. As with the IBM Selectric and its interchangeable “balls,” you had to switch out the wheel to change to a different font style or size. Today, I wonder if I even need a printer - or do I?

The idea of having a computer without a printer was unthinkable. What good would it be, if you couldn’t transfer what you’d produced on the (12 inch monochrome) screen to paper? It’s not as if most of the people for whom the information was intended had their own computers on which to view it, after all.

Since then, I’ve owned a good many printers - although the number of printers I’ve had isn’t nearly as high as the number of computers. A good printer would usually last through several computer upgrades, and multiple computers in the house could share a single printer. Printing technology has certainly advanced over the years, although perhaps not nearly as dramatically as computer technology in general. In fact, my Okidata and Diablo still work and are sitting in the attack.

My first color printer was an inkjet, and it was thrilling to be able to print out documents and pictures in color - almost as cool as getting our first color television set after growing up watching everything in black and white. But as much as I liked that inkjet, I still lusted after the expensive laser printers with output that resembled the print in a book or magazine. Unfortunately, the laser printers were costly, thousands of dollars, expensive to operate, and unreliable.

And of course, the price tag on the printer itself is only part of the story. One of the problems with printers is the cost of supplies. You have to feed it paper, of course, and that can get expensive. And you also have to provide it ink, toner , ribbon - whatever it uses to transfer the text or graphics onto the paper.

One of the more interesting, but least used printers that I had was a thermal printer. The idea of an “inkless” printer sounds great in theory, but the problem was that you had to use special paper for it, and that costs as much as the combination of ink and regular paper. In addition, the print on that early thermal paper didn’t last long; a couple of years later your document had faded away.

Today inkjets and laser printers are still the most popular types, and both can had for a fraction of what they cost back then. There are also solid ink nprinters and dye-sublimation printers for high quality color photo printing. Keeping your printer in supplies can still be a major pain, and few things are more frustrating than hunting through shelves full of hundreds of different printer cartridges at the office supply store, only to find that the model used by your printer isn’t among them.

One way in which printers have advanced is in printing speed. Early printers were excruciatingly slow, often producing little more than a character per second. When I got my first laser, that could turn out 8 pages per minute, I thought I’d really arrived. Now you can buy a printer for less than $50 that will do over 25 pages per minute. In 2005, IBM made a laser printer (the Infoprint 4100) capable of 330 pages per minute. There was a catch, though: the printer’s base price was half a million dollars. Ouch.

Printers have morphed into multi-function machines, and many of those sold today do much more than print. Both of our current printers are also copiers, scanners and fax machines. The footprint for these amazing little multi-taskers has gotten smaller at the same time the prices have fallen, so you can get a device that does a very good job of providing all these functions in a compact package that only takes up a couple of square feet on your desk.

For the past fifteen years, at least, all my printers have been HPs. There are other companies that make good printers, too, but I’ve always had very good luck with HP so I’ve stuck with them. When Vista was released, there were many complaints about printers that didn’t work with the new OS due to lack of drivers from the manufacturers, but my two HPs, a Deskjet and an OfficeJet, made the operating system transition without a hitch.

I’ve noticed, though, that as time goes by, our printers are used less and less. Whereas once upon a time, we went through a printer cartridge every two to four weeks, now we’ll go six months or more without needing a new one. We just don’t print things to paper nearly as much as we used to. Much of the correspondence that we once printed and mail is now sent as email. Articles, white papers, and book chapters are submitted in digital format over the Internet instead of being packed up and shipped off to the published via the postal service. Photos that were once printed for family members to enjoy can now be shared with them on the web. Even contracts are signed electronically and exchanged without ever being printed.

In fact, more and more people I know are telling me that they don’t even have printers anymore. The paperless office is still far from reality for us, but our business is definitely much less paper-centric than it was just a few years ago. I suspect that trend will continue in the future. But I wonder if the eventual demise of printed documents will have its down side, as well as the obvious cost and convenience advantages. There is, after all, something about the look and feel and smell of paper that isn’t quite duplicated on the monitor screen.

And I admit that for documents that are really important, I don’t quite trust them to digital files only. I still make printed copies that I keep in the safe, just in case all six backup files, stored on different computers in different locations, should somehow be destroyed all at the same time.

What about you? Do you still print things out to read them? Or do you only print out documents that are very important? Do you find yourself using your printer a lot less than you did in the past? Have you gotten rid of your printer altogether and gone completely paperless? Will printers someday be obsolete, perhaps only owned by shops where you can take your docs on a memory card or send them over the Internet to be printed? Do you look forward to that day, or will you continue to keep a printer at home as long as you can find the supplies for it? Is it ecologically irresponsible to print what could be kept in purely digital format?