PRINT and SEND for Speedy 'Offline' Prints

摘要

Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a country that seemed very far away, there lived and worked a printer in the Land of Online Database Searching (ODS). The printer in the Land of ODS absorbed the results of database searches performed by hundreds, and later thousands, of searcher people dispersed throughout the realm. At that time, children, most database searches were searches of citations or abstracts of documents—the full text was not in the database. Searchers used a machine that had shiny, curly paper (you may have seen something like this paper in a fax museum), and they ended most searches with a song and a prayer—"Some day my prints will come."