Re: tlug: Printed media?? Who needs TeX?

[John De Hoog <washi@example.com>]

Jonathan Byrne - 3Web <jq@example.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 30 Sep 1998, John De Hoog wrote:
> 
> >Sometimes I worry about you people in academia. ;-) Don't you know by
> >now that printed output is going the way of the typewriter, and that
> >digital output on flat screens and publishing via the Internet are the
> >direction the world is headed?
> 
> And that's why bookstores are filled with more computer books than ever
> before, because computers are moving us toward a paperless paradigm, right? 

Maybe because the man pages are so poor? ;-) Remember, though, first of
all that the number of computer users has increased rather drastically,
second that many people buy those books to get the attached CD, and
third that most of those people are wandering into bookstores because
they have a problem with their computer that they can't yet figure out
how to solve by other means. As the general populace becomes more
computer literate and Internet savvy, lots of those books will go the
way of Byte Magazine. Remember them? A victim of the Internet, perhaps?

> I remember people saying that 20 years ago, and they were just as wrong then 
> as they are now. 
>... 
> Electronic publishing is and will continue to be a great adjunct to print, but
> it doesn't seem to be doing a very good job of killing it off yet.  That may
> someday happen, but not someday soon.

It may never happen completely, but my point was that the academic
community looks pretty silly when it is embarrassed by something as
flexible and revolutionary as html.

--
John De Hoog, Tokyo     <dehoog@example.com>

washi@example.com      

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