The 1998 promise of paperless offices aged like milk

Honestly, I found a 1998 Business Week article in my dad's garage claiming we'd have zero paper files by 2010, and my company's still drowning in lien waivers and permit copies. Instead of eliminating paperwork, we just added email chains and PDF scans on top of the original stacks. Anyone else seeing the same pattern with those old digital office predictions?

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lisa_murray17d agoOG Member

My dad still has a filing cabinet from 1994 in his basement with every single cable bill in it. The scans just made it worse because now we keep both versions just in case. Every contractor job I've seen has three copies of everything plus a PDF backup. The paperless dream just meant we got extra steps before the same stacks. Digital files feel safer so nobody ever deletes them, and that's how you end up with 40 copies of the same invoice.