Why the office of today IS the office of the future

'The Office of the Future': an office where paper has been made a thing of the past. With us since the 1940's, the concept of the 'paperless office' has been around for a long time and still isn't a reality.

Still with inspection, the office of today is a pretty good approximation of the pulp SF style workplace imagined by those in the early 20th century.

For example, consider video conferencing in New York, you're sitting at your desk, discussing affairs with your colleagues in an everyday business meeting - but your colleagues are hundreds if not thousands of miles away. Instead of travelling that distance physically, you simply boot up your webcam, your microphone and your high bandwidth connection and you can discuss things face to face.

In today's world, video conferencing seems like a simple application of technology - but that technology was impossible just thirty years ago. Imagine being from the 1940's; you'd have a heart attack, or at least need a stiff whisky and a cigarette. Although given that your average 1940's businessman could have done both at his desk, there'd still be a few more shocks in store for our erstwhile time-traveller.

Anyway, however you look at it, you can't argue that we haven't quite made it to the prophesied 'paperless office'. Pulped cellulose seems to be a permanent fixture of record keeping and administration. Even if it is being marked by laser-jet printers and sits next to silicon computers in offices awash with electromagnetic communication fields, you can't get rid of paper.

Still, although it's not a 'paperless' office, it's definitely an office with less paper.

Every email that you send would once have been a typed letter (or at least a telegraph); every database would have been a filing cabinet (maybe a whole room of filing cabinets); every rough draft would have to be entirely written again on a whole new set of pages (and no spellchecker).

Something to keep in mind the next time you forget to press 'save' and your PC crashes or you can't open a .zip file...