A Brief History of Forms

On Forms and Filling the Darn Things Out

By Surname: Breault                       Given Name:     Marc

Forms have always been with us.  Back in ancient times, potsherds were the medium of choice and bureaucracies got a big boost because they could permanently record and kind of sort of permanently store information which was sometimes useful.  Clay tablets were second in the hierarchy of forms media.  While clay tablets could provide more comprehensive forms capabilities, they were a little cumbersome and, more importantly, not as readily available as potsherds.  After all, potsherds were everywhere providing a plentiful recording medium for stored information. 

Then someone in Egypt discovered that if they took a bunch of reeds and wove them together just so, and dried them out, and beat them they could get a really neat medium for creating forms. 

One question I must answer here is why would someone go through the trouble of experimenting with reeds in the first place?  The answer is that no one did.  Admit it, you know exactly what happened in Egypt long ago.  Someone’s reed boat fell apart and the poor guy who built it drowned.  Pieces of the boat washed ashore on the Nile and dried out in the sun.  Then by chance, a bureaucrat wandered by, saw the wreckage, and wondered whether there was any potsherd around so he could record the fact and submit it to the births and deaths department.  Finding none, his eye settled upon the dried papyrus and the world changed forever.

Sometime after this momentous discovery, academics figured out they could use this new-fangled papyrus stuff to record really cool information such as why they should be in charge of the growing bureaucracy and why others should be excluded.  Some astronomical and ritual stuff was thrown in just to make their arguments appear more fleshed out than they actually were and thereby accidentally providing future archaeologists with an excuse to construct elaborate pictures of history and society which are mostly wrong. 

The potsherd hung around for centuries but eventually, papyrus won out and the scroll reigned supreme.  When the West lost access to papyrus reeds, vellum took over.  It was better, but not as easy to make or work with.  Forms, as well as the number of people literate enough to fill them out, declined sharply forcing bureaucracies to survive as best as they could.  Forms became used for summary information and less for individual information.  A guy would wander by to record property rights or tax liability and he would fill out the forms while the individuals would supply information orally.  The forms would then be transferred into a book or ledger.  In a way, this was a golden age for individuals because they no longer had to fill out forms.  The bureaucrats did that.  Oh if only this were so today.

But alas, paper more or less as we know it was invented and to make matters worse, so was the printing press and the paper mill to supply the printing press.  This had three main consequences.  First, there was much more material to read.  Second, more and more people learned to read.  Third, forms could now be mass produced and the individual was once again called upon to fill out forms.

When the Information Age hit, forms were everywhere.  At first, this was OK because penmanship was generally good in the developed world.  People actually learned penmanship at school.  Oops, I forgot, I must be politically correct these days so I should say people learned penpersonship at school.  Eventually, of course, when we meet aliens from another planet, we’ll have to say penentityship but I think penpersonship is OK for now.  There, now that I have closed all possible lawsuits against me for discrimination, I can move on.

The increase of information meant people had to write faster and this led to an inevitable consequence.  Penpersonship went to the dogs.  Soon everyone’s handwriting looked like that of a doctor and that of a doctor looked like something a chimpanzee might scratch out if the chimpanzee were inclined to scratch something out on paper.  This, of course, meant that fewer and fewer forms could actually be read by anyone.  We continued to fill them out, and they became more and more useless even as the number of forms multiplied.  This single trend might explain the US government if you think about it in that the government has so much information, and so little capability for dealing with it.

Some people actually wanted to read forms, though I can’t imagine anything more uninteresting, so forms generation software was born.  Not only could you design a form on a computer, people could actually type information into them.  I should point out, though, that typing information into a form was possible, and somewhat common before computers became nearly universal.  This great achievement was accomplished through an instrument known in the day as a typewriter. 

You put a printed form in, and moved the typewriter carriage around until it was positioned just so, and then you typed in information.  You then repeated this process until the form was complete.  Even the US government did this and for a time, a sort of golden age returned because most individuals did not carry a typewriter around with them and most people did not actually own a typewriter.  This meant you went up to the window and watched as the bureaucrat put the form in the typewriter and filled out the form for you while you supplied information orally.  It was the Dark Ages all over again.

The personal computer ruined that and people now had the ability to fill in forms all by themselves, without resorting to handwriting.  The problem was there was no software standard.  You had to buy this package or that, and this really was a low point in human history because not only were we responsible for filling out forms ourselves, more and more bureaucracies expected us to buy something that would enable us to fill out the forms.  Because of this, and the demise of the typewriter thanks to personal computers, handwriting continued to reign.  After all, it is bad enough to have to fill out forms, but it is unspeakably horrifying to have to pay for the privilege of doing so.

Eventually, these software packages went to that great software house in the sky, which is probably owned and operated by Microsoft though this has never been actually confirmed, and the PDF (Portable Document Format) emerged as a standard for forms.  With PDF forms, you had to purchase software to create forms people could fill out on a keyboard, but those filling them out could do so without having to fork out any hard earned cash. 

But you could also create a PDF form which you could not fill in on a keyboard.  You had to fill them out by hand, then send them back to the bureaucracy demanding them.  Since handwriting had well and truly become meaningless by this time, darkness reigned in bureaucracies everywhere.  This probably explains the United Nations and most large corporations.

Then a strange thing happened.  The US government, namely the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) decided to make PDF forms properly so that people could fill them out using a keyboard.  What enlightenment, and from a wholly unexpected source.  Of course this enlightenment was ruled completely by self interest.  After all, if you could not tell who was paying the tax, you might not be able to charge them penalties.  But now this was solved.  They followed up their quantum leap forward with electronic forms but they had to build their own software for that.  The PDF still provided a sort of universal form medium.

Sadly, in Australia, proper PDFs remained only a dream.  PDF forms proliferated Down Under, but only ones you had to fill in by hand.  Sadly, no meaningful PDF forms you could fill in directly from the keyboard were forthcoming.  And so darkness ruled in Australia.  This probably explains both the Howard and Rudd governments.

But finally, today, October 10, 2013, I ran into my first Australian Government PDF form I could fill in from the keyboard.  It was an Australian Federal Police Criminal Check application form which is required by the company I currently contract for.  Of course, I did not realize this at first.  My hopes and expectations in this area have been so cruelly trodden down over and over again, I assumed it was the kind of form that required handwriting.  So I printed it out, and filled it in with a pen.  (Younger readers can Google “pen” to learn what those are).  But then, maybe because there is always a spark of hope that stays lit in all of us, or maybe I wanted to delay getting back to work for a few more precious seconds, I decided to try, one last forlorn time to see if maybe, just maybe, Australia had finally decided to climb out of the dark ages and embrace legible forms.  And my hopes and prayers were answered, by the Australian Federal Police. 

Who knows what the future of forms and form filling holds.  Perhaps one day, we will not need forms because we all have implants which tie us to the collective permanently.  I mean, were the Borg really that bad considering they produced 7 of 9 and all?  Of course, this would mean that the earth would be without forms.  What’s wrong with that?  Well, at the start of creation, the earth was without form according to Genesis.  An earth without forms would mean that after all of these thousands or millions of years (depending on your viewpoint) and all those wars, and calculus, and sliced bread and smart phones, the only thing we managed was to add an s to the state of the earth.  Well, I guess that is something, even if only a very little something.