Trees hate computers - but there is hope! LCDs in the new office (updated)

Trees hate computers - and it has been getting worse for years. Paper use has been rising almost in lock-step with the rise in numbers of computers. The concept of the "paperless office" seems to be fading.

Well, almost. There are excellent examples of paperless applications - litigation software that allows prosecution and defense to easily share huge volumes of evidence for example; but does this really extend to the complete concept of the paperless office?

I don't think so in most cases. Again, there are some companies operating in fairly tightly controlled circumstances that come close - but what is keeping them (and us) from going completely paperless?

Tag: paperless office multiple monitors nvidia screen real estate

Although there are still people who simply are not comfortable with reading documents "online", I'm going to suggest that the one major problem is the lack of computer screen real-estate to match the amount of desk space that the typical worker has. It is just too easy to put a piece of paper on the desk and refer to it while doing work on the computer - paper that may in fact be just a print-out of something like e-mail that started out on the computer and never should have become paper!

Humans are very visually oriented. "Out of sight, out of mind" is true for many - if they can't see it, they don't think about it - or can't take it into consideration in making a decision. Make a clerk have to hide a spreadsheet they've used to do interim calculations so they can see a word processing document, and they will print out the spreadsheet so they can see and refer to it while entering items into the document. Give them a second monitor (and a computer with enough horsepower to run both programs at the same time) and they may learn with time that they don't need to kill more trees to get their work done.

But you really have to go farther than just two monitors - you need to get close to the actual amount of desktop you have normally in front of you, and that takes lots of today's monitors - probably at least 3 if they are 16x9 (wide) orientation and at least 1400 pixels across - but maybe even more.

On my desk I have 5 monitors connected to my main workstation (I have two other computers and one more monitor with some complex switching to allow sharing, but let's keep the discussion to the main system for now)

The new workstation has an ASUS motherboard with 4 PCIx slots into which I put 3 nVidia dual-monitor video cards. Now this multi-board strategy is normally all about getting more video throughput for games and such, but it is also a great way to add screen real estate. There are other solutions that allow as many as 8 monitors on a single card, but they are fairly hard to come by and are usually PCI based, so not as fast as these cards are. Besides, more than 4 monitors on a desk starts to get really extreme. I think 5 is just right!

I put the system together to allow me to do video editing of some of the massive amount of digital video we've been gathering on our Hancock Wildlife Foundation project - but I'm using the system also as my main workstation to replace my older/slower one, and I'm getting far more work done on it than I used to.

I look after a number of companies' technical needs as a contract CTO - and I do a bunch of writing, some of which you see here. I used to print out many of the documents I'd be called upon to work on, just like others who do the same kinds of work.

No longer!

Now I have enough screen real estate that I can comfortably have several open documents up as references while I work on a project - so I don't need the printouts!

I find myself doing my active work on the center two monitors, mostly the one left of center, while the two outside monitors end up holding research and documentation. I've had dual monitors on my older system for some time and added a third one to it just before I got this new system, but the setup was as 3 distinct desktops (under Linux) rather than as one big desktop. I couldn't drag windows from one to the other, but I could cut/paste content between them.

Each of my old system's monitors had virtual desktops active as well, with up to 30 available to me to use. This gave me a potential of 90 different pieces of desktop that something might be active on - and over the years I've developed the habit of always opening the same basic things on the same desktops - e-mail on the left screen on the first desktop, monitoring windows on the right side of the right screen, and web browser windows in the middle, etc. It's complex, and many of the visitors to my office don't know how I keep track of stuff, but I've been getting by for a couple of years now.

On my new system, instead of 90 virtual desktops (30 per screen) I have limited myself to 12, but they spread across all 5 screens. Now, instead of having little pieces of a project spread all over, I have highly identified major tasks that I can switch to and away from quickly. I also have the ability to use a single application spread across all screens, such as the Cinelerra open source video suite I'm using.

Of course just adding more monitors to the user's system is not always the answer. I have a customer in the tax preparation business. They've used just about every tax preparation software package available at some time, even one that we created in-house many years ago.

In the most recent past, their previous software supplier's product treated each tax year as a separate program, so running two - this year's and last year's on the same system but on separate monitors so they could compare a client's returns, was easy. With their current provider's software the single program handles all years and uses a tab structure to access the various years for a single client folio - and it is all but impossible to put two years' returns on the screen at the same time! And of course the software won't allow two instances to be run on the same machine at the same time.

My customer is opting instead for two computers for each preparer, their new one (with XP, not Vista - but that's another story) and their old one with Win95 on it. This was all but impossible with their older monitors, but now that they've moved to LCD monitors they have enough desk space not only for the two monitors, but also for their customers' paperwork - which unfortunately still has to exist.

Now that we've seen the productivity gains that having the two systems/monitors on the preparers' desks, we're looking at adding more screen real estate. Only the switch to LCDs has made this possible.

Personally, I think that the LCD revolution is finally going to affect the computer revolution enough to stop the majority of temporary use of paper in computer communications that many still employ. We won't be needing technologies like Xerox' new "inkless printer" that can erase and re-use the output so much - we simply won't print it in the first place.