Ray Van Eng (08/22/97)                 

Think the paperless office will soon be here as we all rush out in droves to convert stacks upon stacks of paper documents into electronic formats: CD ROMs, hard disks, floppies, optical cards and other storage medium. Fat chance, says Cobblestone Software.

The Lexington, Massachusetts-based company has come up with a novel idea of reversing the process by using plain paper as an instrument to retain computer bits and bytes. Save those logger jobs and keep the good old paper in the office.

Everything would still be done digitally, all right, but the Cobblestone PaperDisk software will translate computer data into bar-code like "datatiles" and mapped onto a piece of paper which can be read by a scanner to retrieve the original information.

Potential uses for this technology include printing computer files on business cards and direct mail, paying bills online and even generating electronic stamps.

A major reason for choosing paper is its ease of handling. Scanning a sheet of pulp is such an effortless operation that as Cobblestone president Tom Antognini puts it, "90 percent of people can do it, while most people refuse to touch a mouse or a keyboard."

Currently, Cobblestone is offering its product as a shareware but the firm hopes to partner with banks, utility companies or even the U.S. Postal Service to deploy PaperDisk as a commercial service.