Over the past 20 years or so we have been fed abundant hot spin and tepid pap about how paper would vanish from our lives - newspapers, magazines (uh oh...), reports, sticky notes, photocopies, and one presumes Form 1040 (wry comment upon the year Lady Godiva rode naked in Coventry protesting taxes). Computers! Here it is 2010 and - are you taking notes? - the paperless office is a nightmare, plus color hardcopy in triplicate (plus two more for Uniform Reduction in Paperwork Act compliance, and one more still for immediate security shredding).
A document was a bunch of (optionally) legible words on white bond when carbon paper fed into manual typewriters. IBM Selectric font balls were a taste of evil to come. Now anybody can call up a word processor or disktop publisher and create richly graphic gigabyte monster desktop-published documents about Friday lunch. The only way to reliably send them around is on paper. If computer viruses and worms don't get you, Redmond's Revenge assuredly will. Which Micrcrap Word format can your box handle? (Does your Wintel computer take a dump, too?)
The alternative is to mount a WWW document through your ISP at your URL in HTML through a WYSIWYG composer followed by FTP if your DNS isn't DOA because a VIP on the QT got a fatal case of dot.com fever. All this was simplified by a company named Adobe and its Portable Document Format (*.pdf). Anything from ASCII to HTML to LaTex [La (short "a") Tech (German "h")] to MS Word (good luck with that chocolate-covered turd) can be swallowed and instantly eructated as a universally readable security-rich digital file. The software is called Adobe Acrobat, possibly because you have to jump through hoops to make it work.
I am a very naughty scientist. Certain richly textual documents issuing from my computer could peel the hide off an elephant. (I use custom-hacked WordStar in DOS. WordStar is a safe haven where HTML can be coded without being default raped by a program called Word.) Let us join Uncle Al as he joins the circus to convert what is obsolete but sufficiently complex http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/eotvos.htm now into the sweet simplicity of qz.pdf then (containing twice the number of bytes). This was performed at the cutting edge of human thought and capability, at a university with wideband fiberoptic data plumbing. Yeah, like that made any difference.
The only box with a full Adobe Acrobat suite was in the Main Office one floor up and the whole building over from my steam-powered Chemcomp10. I walked the mile to turn on the office machine, then walked the mile back (uphill in both directions). When I called up the network I discovered Chemcomp10 could not find Sten01. OK, so I copied the unhappy file on a floppy and walked the mile back to the office to discover Sten01 does not read Chemcomp10's floppies, either (bad A: drive). I walked the mile back to Chemcomp10 to put the motherless file on a Zip disk (from Iomega; not to be confused with a ZIP archive from PKWARE), except Chemcomp10 does not have a Zip drive. Chemcomp31 has a Zip drive. I walked across the room to boot up Chemcomp31 and walked back to stubborn Chemcomp10, that doesn't recognize accursed Chemcomp31 on the network. I took the motherless file on the fatherless floppy from stubborn Chemcomp10 and carried it over to accursed Chemcomp31 (could not find Sten01, either) with a freaking Zip disk and used execrable "My Computer" to copy the motherless file, with none of the extensions showing because Redmond's Revenge is a hairball. I carried the freaking Zip disk holding the motherless file the woeful mile back to Sten01 that somebody had thoughtfully turned off. I booted that (expletive deleted) and finally inserted the freaking Zip disk into the Zip drive and clicked up Adobe Acrobat (that was version 4.0 not 8.0 because this was Canukistan) and it said... and it said...
"Zip drive? Give me the better part of your life and some of your liver and spleen to find it."
Time passed. A secretary sniggered. "You are the lucky one! It wanted my first born, plus options on future siblings."
The screen popped. I threaded the security options. I clicked "Save."
That instantly converted my HTML file into a PDF file and eventually wrote it to the freaking Zip disk that I carried the woeful mile back to accursed Chemcomp31 that copied the miserable PDF file from the freaking Zip disk onto the fatherless floppy that fit into stubborn Chemcomp10. Then glorious ZTREE (pronounced "zedtree" in the Great Dank North) put the miserable PDF file onto stubborn Chemcomp10's hard drive. I called up (because Uncle Al trusts nothing in Redmond's Revenge) a current Adobe Reader (because Uncle Al hacked the machine a little). Low and behold, Redmond's Revenge had rotorootered the unhappy HTML file's coding so it was dripping with stuff oozing from the Gates of Hell.
Blessed are the paranoid, for they shall have made backups. I did the whole !!*#^$)#!! process again. Had a help screen come up in French I would have put my fist through it. (Men do that and feel good about having done it, bloodied floors notwithstanding. Women do not understand and therefore cannot open cold pickle jars. Chemcomp10 will only talk over the network with a Power Mac in the machine shop. I think they are going steady.)
My Web site is active. You may download now current parity.pdf. If you want to be sure, if you really want to be sure... drop me an e-mail. I'll send you a copy. On paper.