Each week Joshua Fruhlinger contributes This is the Modem World, a column dedicated to exploring the culture of consumer technology. There was a time -- early in my computing career -- that your average printer could output better results than any screen could. In the days before WYSIWYG word processors, we would guess what the printed product might look like and then let an Okidata monstrosity scream out ugly 5 x 7 dot matrix results. When it worked, it worked well, and we were thrilled that our 16KB machines could make something real. A continuous ream of paper was fed into the printer and we'd happily
