Never in a million years would I have guessed that I could influence the mighty Microsoft, but I’m pretty sure I have. Here’s how…

Thanks to the Internet I have become a world authority on the history of carbon paper. In 1994 I wrote an essay on that subject as part of my MBA. Later that year, when I was teaching myself HTML in order to develop my own web page I uploaded my essay as a simple test of my new web skills. I didn’t want to write anything new so I simply used my old essay. I never bothered to remove it, and so it’s been on my website in one form or another ever since.

I didn’t register my site with any search engines or promote my essay in any way, so I was surprised when a couple of months later I received an e-mail from someone asking for more information about carbon paper (although I didn’t promote it, the essay had a link back to my homepage). Since then (1995) I have received many similar requests. The essay has been referred to twice by articles published in the New York Times. It has appeared in an Australian anthology of stories (intended for school children) about the history of technology. I have had requests for more information from several manufacturers of carbon paper and even one German documentary film maker. I have even been interviewed via telephone about carbon paper!

Well of course, you can probably guess what had happened. The search engines had found my essay while crawling the net, and because it’s a fairly esoteric subject, my page was listed whenever anyone searched for information about carbon paper using Yahoo or Altavista or Infoseek, etc.

I must admit that I am amazed at the situation today, seven years later. Google cites my page first (at its old location) and second (at its current location) in its list of 670,000 hits when you search for carbon paper (try it now Google Search: Carbon Paper). Given the way Google ranks hits, this means in effect that my page is the most popular page about carbon paper on the Internet!

Interestingly, the third link in Google’s results takes you to an essay on Microsoft’s site about the importance of computer accessibility for people with disabilities: Curb Cuts and Carbon Paper. It includes the following introduction…

When a chime sounds to signal that an elevator car has arrived, few of us realize that we?re taking advantage of a technology originally developed to give people with disabilities extra time to reach the door before it closes. In fact, many technologies that were first designed to assist people with disabilities were later widely adopted because of their value to everyone. Carbon paper was first developed for blind and partially sighted clerks who could not tell when their quill pens ran out of ink. The typewriter was invented for a countess who was blind. Curb cuts, first created for people using wheelchairs, are now used by everyone from cyclists to parents with strollers.

Well, where did they get that information about carbon paper and the Countess? No sources are given, but I’ve never come across it anywhere other than my essay and my original source which was Michael Adler’s book on the typewriter. So, I’m pretty certain that Microsoft’s author took it as written by the world’s foremost networked carbon paper historian: me!