From the very first day personal computers and online access became relatively inexpensive and popular, there was the dream of a paperless revolution. In other words, rather than printing all your documents, including manuscripts and even financial records, you’d reduce them to ones and zeros and turn them into computer files. In the early days, you used floppy disks for storage that were later accompanied by hard drives, but later on you used CDs, DVDs and thumb drives for removable storage. Capacity soared as fast as ways to consume that capacity .

But with easy online access came places to store your stuff in ways that made it easy for other people to read. So you had blogs and social networks to spread the word. Face-book and other companies turned the concept of social networks into billion dollar businesses that stored and monetized your words and pictures, coherent and otherwise.

Yes, you still buy printers and expensive consumables, but maybe not quote as often as before. I recently reverted to a cheap Brother laser printer that, when I use recycled consumables, costs less than a penny a page to operate. It’s rare that I need four-colors. Still, money is money, and I have enough storage at hand to keep my stuff in digital form. I can also call on Microsoft OneDrive, part of the Office 365 subscription, to place up to 1TB in the cloud.

Of course, my ISP won’t let me send that much in the way of data because of the dreaded bandwidth cap.

Now as many of you know, although I’ve worked as a broadcaster since my early 20s, I also have a long background in the publishing world. I have written books and edited and published magazines, and the romance and the feel of the printed page remains, at my advanced age, endlessly attractive.

As a practical matter, however, print is essentially dead, although some publishers may not know it yet. The remaining physical newspapers are mostly on hard times, with reduced advertising revenue and page counts, and smaller staffs. Most of the content has been pushed online, though some of it resides behind a paywall. This means you have to subscribe to get more than the paragraph or two posted to tempt you to read more.

With proper preservation techniques, printed material can be stored without serious deterioration. So it’s there for you to read a decade from now, or 500 years from now all things being equal. Maybe our heirs will need to learn our peculiar twenty-first century colloquialisms, but the content will be readable and, we presume, understandable.

But the other day, I was cleaning out a night table in the master bedroom and found a tape cassette dating back to the 1980s. To me, it was a useless piece of plastic containing an equally useless magnetic coated roll of tape inside. Why useless? Well, I gave up my last cassette recorder, a Radio Shack mind you, a decade or two ago. Or maybe it disappeared in the move from one home to another, and I haven’t had a car with a cassette player in years. For $39.97, I can still buy a cassette recorder from Radio Shack; well, at least as long as the stores last, and that won’t be long. Without buying something new, the recording contains something I cannot hear.

Before the last move to a new home, I encountered a box of floppy disks dating back to the early 1990s. I hoped I transferred that content onto CD, because it’s been years since I had a floppy drive. Truth to tell, you can still buy a USB-based floppy drive for less than $20, so you should be able to read most floppies, well except the ones smaller than 1.4MB. But even if you can read the files, would you have an app that can open them? Maybe Word, but not QuarkXPress and other important productivity apps.

And what about apps that haven’t been updated in years, software no longer being developed?

So we have documents that may be no more than 10 or 15 years old that suddenly can’t be opened unless you have a vintage Mac or PC with an older version of the app. There may be other ways to trick your computer to open those documents, but you are suddenly confronted with a wave of incompatibility in what is, in the scheme of things, a very short time.

Of course all those photos and videos you post on Instagram or Face-book are saved in industry standard formats, such as JPEG or MOV. At least they are standard formats now, but what about a decade from now? What about all that peerless prose you posted online to your WordPress blogs, or a social network?

How much of that material will still be available in the far future? What about the stuff you deposited in the cloud for safekeeping? Will the services that host your data even be around? After all, the cloud is just a network of servers with hard drives or SSDs, no doubt more powerful and reliable than your equipment, but still based on the same technologies.

A thousand years from now, imagine distant visitors from another star system stopping by on Earth to see what happened to those foolish humans whose civilization had long since vanished. How much will there be in the way of relics to assess our history? They might be able to restore and, with their own computers and expert translators, read our printed documents, but what about those floppies, those mechanical hard drives and other storage devices? Will any of it be left to decode? Would SSDs be the most durable medium?

How much have we sacrificed in the permanence of our written words and photos by moving everything to the cloud? How long can you depend on that stuff being available, particularly as new companies and services arise to replace the old ones?

Yes, print may be on life support, but it’ll be a say day for everyone when it disappears. Just recall the quaint birthday present Dr. McCoy handed to Captain Kirk in the 1982 sci-fi classic, “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn,” and consider how real that scene might actually be in our far future.

So I wake up one day, and attempt to make a phone call on my “landline,” only to find that I’m not getting a dial tone. Now my home phone is actually one of those VoIP systems, presently from ITP of New York City, which offers “Premium Unlimited” service for $19.99 per month plus taxes and other fees.

Typical of most VoIP systems, you get a special adapter that connects to your cable/DSL modem or your router, thus using your Internet connection to provide telephone service. Unlike POTS, the plain old telephone service, it’s not a hard wired system, and depends on the quality of your online hookup to give you usable performance. If your Internet goes down — or you have a power outage — your phone service dies with it.

Now most VoIP services that I know about also offer a fallover feature. So if your connection is offline for any reason, calls are forwarded to an emergency number you specify, which is probably your mobile phone. Even though many of you rely strictly on your wireless phone, I won’t until audio quality is more consistent and the caller is no longer lost in a digital haze. I might then consider buying one of those desk phones that extends a cell phone connection, but not yet.

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Recently I switched ISPs. Main reason is that the folks at CenturyLink refused to renew a super discount program that offered me more than 40 megabits downloads for less than $40 a month. So I’m paying a bit more for a somewhat higher level of speed from Cox Communications as part of yet another super discount package, a bundle that includes cable TV.

No matter. It’s one of those things, and I guess I’m lucky to have a choice of two ISPs that offer real broadband as now defined by the FCC. That definition calls for 25 megabits or higher downloads.

Meanwhile, the FCC is poised to set new regulations that impose net neutrality on ISPs. That means your ISP cannot throttle your speeds because a service, such as Netflix, is using lots and ought to pay an extra fee, or ransom, for the privilege. There has been loads of fear-mongering on the subject. that net neutrality will discourage ISPs from investing in building out their systems — and improving performance — so that more people get faster service at affordable prices. I wouldn’t pretend to judge such matters, except to say that I have seen the need for net neutrality in practice, and many of you have.

No it’s not my ISP throttling Netflix. When I was still with CenturyLink, they had some sort of disagreement with a backbone or peering provider that kept traffic from my web server coming in at full speed. Now as a small businessperson, I do not have the cash to pay off an ISP so my little server can perform at the full rate offered by its gigabit pipe.

In any case, I’m happy with Cox when it comes to my broadband performance. I’m really getting something in the range of the advertised speed, more or less.

But there is one potentially fatal problem that continues to threaten the well being of anyone who spends a fair amount of time online, and that’s the bandwidth cap.

With CenturyLink, it was 250GB, but only for downloads. So I could upload to my hearts content. I could send tens and tens of gigabytes to a cloud-based backup service and never suffer from exceeding the bandwidth limit. Not so with Cox with similar and sometimes higher bandwidth allocations that depend on your Internet plan.

Whether downloading or uploading, it’s all counted towards the total, and I have to tell you I’ve come awfully close. So I’ve taken the step of cutting back on the type of files I send to the cloud. I haven’t even watched much in the way of streaming video, but that will change when I reactivate my Netflix account later this month to binge on “House of Cards.” But I might wait till March so the bandwidth consumed doesn’t count against this month’s allocation.

I never thought I had to fret over such things, and I’d be tempted to return to CenturyLink, despite the higher price, if I didn’t have a 24-month deal with Cox. Assuming finances are sufficient, I might have considered upgrading to Cox’s GIG Life — their new gigabit service — when it arrives in my locale.

But what about the bandwidth cap? Well, it’s 1TB for GIG Life, which is still insufficient. While it may seem generous, if you’re really taking full advantage of the higher performance for which you’re paying, you’ll use that up in days with 4K TV streams and other content. And don’t forget your online backup service, iCloud, Microsoft’s One Drive, or any other cloud-based storage system.

I suppose I understand the limits when it comes to wireless carriers. They are already clogging the cell towers, so more data may indeed tax their capacity. Is there any danger of that with your ISP? If they are feeding 100 megabit or even 1,000 megabit service, is it fair to restrict a customer’s bandwidth to a few hundred gigabytes?

Indeed, what happens if you exceed your bandwidth cap?

Well that appears to depend on your ISP. Some might tolerate it from time to time. Others reserve the right to throttle your service or cut you off as a serial abuser. In some cases, you just pay for the higher bandwidth and be done with it, and if the price for using the service too much is reasonable, I suppose that’s all right.

Now I do not know how much bandwidth these ISPs can handle, and whether that’s the reason for putting limits on their systems. But I would hope they’d just add sufficient capacity to handle the extra load, but someone has to pay for the extra Internet pipes. It’s not that consumption is going down. Of course when you call and complain, they might just try to upsell you to a business class service at maybe twice the price. There’s always a way to grab extra cash from you in exchange for your alleged excessive online use.

Unfortunately when you read about all the joys of cable cutting, being able to use iTunes, Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video, Dish Network’s Sling TV and other services to get rid of cable, you may not consider the potential land mines. If your former cable company supplies your broadband, they’ll make up what they lose — and possibly more — if they charge you for using too much bandwidth when you download all that extra content.

As with statements from any notable, anything Tim Cook says in a public setting will be widely reported, with key soundbites quoted around the world. This is the understandable consequence of being CEO of an iconic company that just happens to have the largest market cap of any publicly traded corporation on the planet.

If Cook says something that’s really different or significant, there will be plenty to chew over. So in that spirit, I looked over his quoted comments at Tuesday’s annual Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference to see if he really made news. I mean, beyond just repeating pretty much what he’s said before in other public settings.

So we know, for example, that Apple professes not to believe in the “laws of large numbers,” and doesn’t build gear because it can sell lots of copies even if that’s usually the end result. There are considerations such as the greater good, which is evidently the reason Apple is spending $850 million to build a solar farm in rural Monterey County, CA, located south of San Francisco. The plant will be used to power the new Apple campus in Cupertino, 52 Apple Stores in California and a datacenter.

Well, I suppose a renewable energy project, on the long haul, will possibly compensate for its costs by reducing power costs. It would appear, though, the benefits to society will outweigh the time it takes to recoup the benefits of that investment. On the whole, this is the most significant new announcement during Cook’s speech.

The rest of his presentation was fairly predictable, and that there’s nothing out there to halt or slow its stellar growth.

True, Apple earns the lion’s share of smartphone profits, and is more profitable than other PC makers. But Apple still has a minority share of the mobile handset market compared to Android. It’s also true that, although, Mac sales have been on the rise for years, there’s a lot of room to grow even in what appears to be the twilight of the PC area.

Still, Cook claimed the company never puts market share first, commenting, “We’re actually not focused on the numbers, we’re focused on the things that produce the numbers.”

As I said, it’s about marketing.

On Apple Watch, Cook cited the iPod as an example of succeeding in an undeveloped market, that MP3 player sales were relatively insignificant until Apple’s contender arrived with a better solution. By the same token, sales of smartwatches haven’t been so good. Other companies manage, at best, sales in the hundreds of thousands. Pebble’s one million total includes 2013 and 2014, and it’s barely a blip compared to Apple’s typical numbers.

Cook’s comments about Apple Watch were also heavily infused with marketing fluff, about the huge number of features, how it would become an indispensable appliance, how it would “change the way you live your life.”

Well, if that’s the case, maybe analyst estimates of tens of millions of sales the first year are indeed accurate, or maybe they are listening too closely to the sales spiels for Apple Watch. Expectations are certainly high and Apple may have a hard time meeting those expectations. But even if only a few million are sold during 2015, that may itself be more than all other smartwatch makers combined, so how could such an achievement be criticized? Well, because it’s about Apple and Apple can never do well enough to satisfy such people.

So a lot of what Cook said was little more than corporate spin. Apple is doing great, the competitors cannot possibly compete. He spoke of the iPad, where sales are not quite what they used to be, as a still-amazing achievement. Wouldn’t you expect Cook to present anything but a carefully crafted message designed make everything from Apple seem wonderful?

He would not, obviously, talk about the ongoing problems with Apple software. He spoke of the joys of Continuity, being able to receive a call from your iPhone on a number of devices, including iPads and Macs. He did not discuss the annoyance of having multiple ring tones and, on a Mac at least, being unable to add a custom ring tone that matched the one you might be using on your iPhone. He would not mention when the system just doesn’t work, or that older Macs cannot work with Handoff because they lack Bluetooth LE, or about the ongoing software glitches that make using some of the tentpole features of OS X Yosemite and iOS 8 an unpleasant experience.

Now I realize he wouldn’t present news that wasn’t 100% positive, but submitting to tough questions ought to be an important part of such events. Just letting a powerful corporate executive deliver a sales pitch doesn’t really help inform investors or customers.

So far, the coverage of Cook’s speech has been little better than reading content generated by copy machines. Apple has a powerful story to tell, but how many times must we hear him repeat the same story with a few different flourishes before it becomes old news?