In information handling, the U.S.

Federal Standard 1037C Federal Standard 1037C, titled Telecommunications: Glossary of Telecommunication Terms, is a United States Federal Standard issued by the General Services Administration pursuant to the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949, ...

(Glossary of Telecommunication Terms) defines a hard copy as a permanent reproduction, or copy, in the form of a physical object, of any media suitable for direct use by a person (in particular

paper Paper is a thin sheet material produced by mechanically or chemically processing cellulose fibres derived from wood, Textile, rags, poaceae, grasses, Feces#Other uses, herbivore dung, or other vegetable sources in water. Once the water is dra ...

), of displayed or transmitted

data Data ( , ) are a collection of discrete or continuous values that convey information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted for ...

. Examples of hard copies include

teleprinter A teleprinter (teletypewriter, teletype or TTY) is an electromechanical device that can be used to send and receive typed messages through various communications channels, in both point-to-point (telecommunications), point-to-point and point- ...

pages, continuous printed tapes, computer printouts, and radio photo prints. On the other hand, physical objects such as

magnetic tape Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic storage made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on the earlier magnetic wire recording from Denmark. Devices that use magnetic ...

floppy disks A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a ...

, or non-printed punched paper tapes are not defined as hard copies by 1037C.Hard copy
as defined in

. A file that can be viewed on a screen without being printed is sometimes called a soft copy. The U.S. Federal Standard 1037C defines "soft copy" as "a nonpermanent display image, for example, a cathode ray tube display." The term "hard copy" predates the digital computer. In the book and newspaper printing process, "hard copy" refers to a manuscript or typewritten document that has been edited and proofread and is ready for

typesetting Typesetting is the composition of text for publication, display, or distribution by means of arranging physical ''type'' (or ''sort'') in mechanical systems or '' glyphs'' in digital systems representing '' characters'' (letters and other ...

or being read on-air in a radio or television broadcast. The old meaning of hard copy was mostly discarded after the

information revolution The Information Age is a historical period that began in the mid-20th century. It is characterized by a rapid shift from traditional industries, as established during the Industrial Revolution, to an economy centered on information technology. ...

.hard copy
as defined by Merriam-Webster Online.

Use in computer security

One often-overlooked use for printers is in the field of

IT security Computer security (also cybersecurity, digital security, or information technology (IT) security) is a subdiscipline within the field of information security. It consists of the protection of computer software, systems and networks from thr ...

. Copies of various system and server activity logs are typically stored on the local filesystem, where a remote attacker – having achieved their primary goals – can then alter or delete the contents of the logs in an attempt to "cover their tracks" or otherwise thwart the efforts of system administrators and security experts. However, if the log entries are simultaneously given to a printer, line-by-line, a local hard-copy record of system activity is created – which cannot be remotely altered or otherwise manipulated.

Dot matrix printers Dot matrix printing, sometimes called impact matrix printing, is a computer printing process in which ink is applied to a surface using a relatively low-resolution dot matrix for layout. Dot matrix printers are a type of impact printer that p ...

are ideal for this task, as they can sequentially print each log entry, one at a time, as they are added to the log. The usual dot-matrix printer support for continuous stationery also prevents incriminating pages from being surreptitiously removed or altered without evidence of tampering.

"Dead-tree" dysphemism

The hacker's ''

Jargon File The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT AI Lab ...

'' defines a ''dead-tree version'' to be a paper version of an online document, where the phrase "dead trees" refers to

. A saying from the ''Jargon File'' is that ''"You can't

grep grep is a command-line utility for searching plaintext datasets for lines that match a regular expression. Its name comes from the ed command g/re/p (global regular expression search and print), which has the same effect. grep was originally de ...

dead trees"'', which comes from the

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

command , which searches the contents of text files. This means that there is an advantage to keeping documents in digital form, rather than on paper, so that they can be more easily searched for specific contents. A similar entry in the ''Jargon File'' is "tree-killer", which may refer to either a printer or a person who wastes paper. ''Dead-tree edition'' refers to a printed paper version of a written work, as opposed to digital alternatives such as a

web page A web page (or webpage) is a World Wide Web, Web document that is accessed in a web browser. A website typically consists of many web pages hyperlink, linked together under a common domain name. The term "web page" is therefore a metaphor of pap ...

References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hard Copy Information technology Intellectual capital de:Hardcopy