But it's more than the romance of the ink that is missed. One has lost the visual impact of all discards with the use of the virtual trashcan. The psychology of seeing or the stark visual impact of a trashcan filled to the brim with all the imperfect and therefore discarded attempts of one's creative effort is lost - almost forever. These were the metrics of effort now untenable in the virtual trashcan. Gone. Who knows how one's next attempt would have shaped out or re-imagined had one seen even a few of the uncountable crumpled up balls of paper strewn across the room? Maybe a signal to give up? Maybe a sign to believe that one hasn't reached even half way to acceptable quality?

The mess is still there but only now one keeps the detritus of all of one's creative efforts, all the previous discarded attempts, silently gunked up in the recesses of the forgetful mind.

One would argue that version control might be sufficient to trace the evolution of ideas. But no. One would still miss the violence of the mind changes, of reckless scribbles or of reattempts that often take place in between the commits. Things are forever lost in the virtual trashcan and it's blunt implement, the backspace.

I really have no idea what you're talking about. I absolutely hated paper. The inconvenience of wanting to add some content higher up the page and having to redo the whole page to achieve that was infuriating to me. I for one am quite pleased that I no longer have as many violent urges when I'm composing text.

True. However the inflexibility of the physical media (pen/typewriter+paper) forced people to think and plan before they acted. These days, not so much, and I can see the difference in approach when my kids are writing essays - back in the day we were taught to come up with a little plan, toc, etc before getting down to the details. Now my kids just spit it out without structure, then add bits an pieces here and there and call it done. Maybe they are taught the structural approach in scool, but the tools aren't helping.

This is like complaining about interactive terminals because programmers no longer have to think so hard about their code before writing it out to punch cards....

I think you mean writing it out on coding sheets before sending it to the "girls" to be punched onto card's

That was so early 1960s. In the mid 60s to the mid 70s, you had to mostly do it yourself unless you were really senior and still programming.

Well in the early 80's I entered fortran code that an Engineer had written onto coding sheets for our two phase flow simulator

And I suspect that this went on longer in traditional big iron shops.

I'm old enough to have typed papers in my youth. It sucked because you had to write it twice, one draft by hand, then type it up. When you were drafting you had to physically cut and paste, with scissors and tape. It was annoying and didn't improve workflow at all.

It's called agile essay writing.

There is Agile Technical Writing.

https://www.drexplain.com/press/articles/agile_technical_wri...

Typewriters weren't the right tool for composing text, although there were some successful people that made it work, especially at offices or newspapers.

Knuth still does use a pencil and paper, as far as I know. He only types the manuscript in Emacs once he has composed it.

And more than just for academic papers: TeX was hand written in full on yellow legal pad, and then typed into the full-screen editor.

I have this again today with 3D printing. It’s such a flawed process, and my real trash bin fills up quickly with failed prints.

Hopefully you get to enjoy VR/AR at some point. You could build a widget that connects your git repos to visualizations of filing cabinets, and your Recycle Bin to a visualization of your room being full to the ceiling with crumpled documents.

For bonus points, find a generic document preview library (a la macOS Preview), render images of everything in the Recycle Bin, and use these as the textures for all the crumpled bits of paper. And use a procedural physically-based renderer to make all the crumples move as you walk around the room!

Potentially also make all the videos in the Recycle Bin play on the crumples.

I'm completely serious; this will exist eventually. You might as well make it, you have the romantic motivation for it.

You should write. This was amazing to read. Do you have a blog?

I still miss the IBM selectric typewriter :-)

I enjoyed learning how they added a rotating ball to that typewriter and hooked it up to some kind of mainframe for the first APL implementation I think.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_DTpQ4Kk2wA

I miss the lined green dot matrix printouts. Best way to read code. But maybe I'm just romanticising.