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The Taxing Info Superhighway
From: David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Sat, 26 Mar 1994 09:09:44 -0500
To: farber () central cis upenn edu From: lbreit () eff org (Lisa Breit) Subject: The Taxing Info Superhighway Dave, I thought you might find this tale of the internet for everyman interesting. Lisa B. ------- Start of forwarded message ------- From: MCRN!NATHANB () micronic netcom com (NATHAN BROOKWOOD) To: davet ( Dave Teichholtz ) Subject: Re: Technology is great Date: 24-Mar-94 11:17:08 I needed some tax forms to report my nanny's income for 1993. (Johnnie still has aspirations to high governmental office.) Just as I was getting ready to drive to the local IRS office, I learned that a library of tax forms, in adobe acrobat format, now resided on compuserve. And, as a special deal, they even had a down-loadable version of the acrobat reader, needed to recreate these forms in all their IRS glory on my local printer.(This costs $25 in the stores.) So, rather than drive 5 miles to get the forms on the traditional highway, I decided to take advantage of the emerging information superhighway. I logged into Compuserve, found the forms, and began to download them. Two forms, two instruction sheets, four pages at ~ 1/2 hour per form. No sweat. Then I went to download adobe acrobat. I discovered that only the windows version was available, but the system promised that the macintosh version would be on-line in a few days. Compuserve customer service hadn't been aware that the press release said it was already there. I logged in a few days latter and acrobat for macintosh was there. Distributed as four 800 KB uncompressed floppy images, approximately one hour (each) to download. Four hours later, I tried to install acrobat from floppy images. Installer crashes consistently. Try to install from images, going around installer. Doesn't work. Dump images to floppies and try to install. Success. Finally, load acrobat (which requires, of course, ATM (which is one one of the floppy images)) and call up the first form. It comes to life on the screen, and looks beautiful. Of course, there's no way to fill it out on screen, and then print a completed copy. First you have to print it out, and then fill it out via pen, in the traditional manner. Up to this point I have invested about four hours of my time and six hours of billable compuserve time, in order to avoid the 20 minute trip to local IRS office. But I figure I've traversed the learning curve into acrobat, and the incremental cost per form will be minimal, so it's not that bad. So I start printing the blank form. My laser printer struggles for twenty minutes, and finally gives up. "Delete fonts or add memory" the error message says. I spend about an hour trying various tactics to get get something out, and even consult the manual, which was on another of those floppy images, for assistance. (I could print out the manual.) Then I consider whether my stylewriter, with its software driver not constrained by memory, might work. Unfortunately, I packed it up and put it in the garage last year after I upgraded to the new laser printer. So I pull it down from its dusty shelf, reassemble it, reinstall its drivers, and once again click on print. Amazingly, it spins into action and my forns start flowing off the information superhighway. Unfortunately, I missed the filing deadline by 8 days, and the IRS just assessed me a $20 penalty. I'm debating whether I should file an appeal. The form to do this is on compuserve. Elapsed time (including on-ramps, off-ramps and detours): ~ 8 days Compuserve time: 6 hours (@ $12.95 hour; rate went down following week) My time: 10 hours -- but I learned a lot, and I can do the next form in just the 30 minutes it takes to download, which is only 10 minutes longer than it takes to drive to and from the IRS office. ------- End of forwarded message -------
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- The Taxing Info Superhighway David Farber (Mar 26)