One of the most defining facets of civilized mankind has been our ability to communicate and to store this information in a permanent form. Although humans have inhabited the earth for thousands of years, written records have only been around for a few thousands of years. Many early cultures endeavored to pass down through the generations an oral history of their society, but if you’ve ever played the parlor game “Gossip,” you can easily understand how the information can become distorted. This severely limits our knowledge of ancient history.

After the Egyptians invented papyrus reed parchment about 3000 B.C., little changed with regard to how we recorded our written correspondence and records for thousands of years.

After Gutenberg invented his printing press in the 15th century, changes began to be made. These changes were slow at first, but they began to pick up steam by the time of the Industrial Revolution.

Today, the technological innovations in information management change almost daily and are seemingly without limit.

Each year about this time when children are beginning a new school year, one of the first orders of business is to procure school supplies. In earlier generations, the school children used slates, which were similar to small blackboards, instead of paper. In recent decades we’ve all used Big Chief tablets and a huge wooden pencil. I’ve never understood why children’s small hands need big pencils, and big adult hands need small pencils. Something here just doesn’t seem logical.

As far as I know, little has changed for the younger children with regard to writing materials from when I was a kid. I don’t think they need a laptop computer until they’re in junior high.

During the first half of the 20th century we saw little progress. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that we began to see changes in the way we handled paperwork. At this time, calculators, copy machines and fax machines began to show up in offices. They were a great help, but offices still required a large clerical staff to do all the typing and filing of paperwork.

Formal correspondence would normally be drafted in long-hand, given to a secretary to type in a double spaced rough, reviewed by the originators, perhaps retyped in another rough draft, and then finally typed in a smooth version with a “rainbow” of carbon copies.

How long has it been since you’ve seen a piece of carbon paper loaded into a typewriter? Even worse, when was the last time you saw or used a mimeograph machine?

For decades school materials and handouts, church bulletins, and any number of documents requiring multiple copies were printed on mimeograph machines. During the entire time I served in the Navy, we published a daily Plan of the Day and Flight Schedule that were duplicated on such a machine. This didn’t change until the 1980’s when the personal computer and printer took over.

Computers have totally revolutionized the way we handle written correspondence, documents and records. A large percentage of our paperwork has been completely eliminated, and it is now stored and transmitted electronically as digital data.

Each week as I write this column, I no longer use a Big Chief tablet and a No. 2 yellow pencil and hand carry it to Weatherford so it can be set on the linotype machine for printing. Instead, I type it into the Microsoft Word word processing program where it will automatically check for spelling mistakes, grammar errors, print it on paper and store it on my hard drive. I can then fire it off in seconds via e-mail to Beth Bovio at the Democrat office who takes it from there.

This may all seem pretty convenient, but for all you old-timers like me, don’t you miss the smell of mimeograph fluid in the morning?