If you’ve spent any time digging into the history of personal computing or the evolution of the "Small Web," you’ve likely stumbled upon the legend of the printer of Udells. It sounds like some cryptic artifact from a fantasy novel. It isn’t.
Actually, it’s one of the most practical, slightly eccentric experiments in digital-to-physical workflows ever documented by a tech journalist.
Jon Udell—a name synonymous with Byte Magazine, InfoWorld, and the early days of web services—didn't just buy a printer. He built a philosophy around it. Back in the early 2000s, while everyone else was shouting about the "paperless office," Udell was busy figuring out how to make paper smarter. He treated his printer as a node on the network, an endpoint that didn't just spit out documents but acted as a bridge between the fluid, messy world of RSS feeds and the high-resolution, tactile reality of a physical page.
It was weird. It was brilliant. It honestly feels more relevant now, in our era of digital burnout, than it did twenty years ago.
Why the Udell Printer Concept Still Resonates
We live in a world of "tab rot." You open forty tabs, read three paragraphs of each, and then your browser crashes or your brain just gives up. Udell saw this coming. He realized that the computer screen is a terrible place for deep synthesis. To solve this, he turned his printer into a high-speed delivery system for what he called "The Personal Paper Web."
Most people think of a printer as a peripheral you use to print a boarding pass or a tax return. Udell viewed it as a specialized display device.
Think about the physics of it. A standard laser printer in 2004 could hit 1200 DPI. Your monitor at the time? Lucky to hit 96 DPI. Even today, with Retina displays and 4K monitors, the "glanceability" and spatial memory associated with physical paper beats a scrolling window every single time. Udell’s setup wasn't about being "old school." It was about bandwidth. Human bandwidth.
He used tools like Greasemonkey scripts and custom CSS to strip the "chrome" (the ads, sidebars, and junk) off the web. When he found something worth reading, he didn't "bookmark" it to be forgotten. He sent it to the printer. This created a physical queue. If a stack of paper was sitting on his desk, it was a tactile reminder of intellectual debt. You can’t ignore a stack of paper the way you can ignore a folder in Pocket or Instapaper.
The Technical Guts of the Experiment
How did he actually do it? It wasn't just hitting Ctrl+P.
Udell’s "printer" was a combination of hardware and some very clever software plumbing. He leaned heavily on the HP LaserJet 1320 series—a workhorse of that era known for its duplexing capabilities. Duplexing (printing on both sides) was the "killer app" for him. It halved the bulk of his reading material and made it feel like a professional manuscript.
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- The Workflow: He’d use a combination of RSS aggregators and browser extensions.
- The Format: He often used a "two-up" layout, printing two logical pages on a single side of physical paper. This essentially turned a standard sheet into a four-page booklet.
- The Scripting: He famously used Python and Perl scripts to scrape content and format it into clean PDF or PostScript files before they ever touched the print spooler.
It’s easy to forget how revolutionary this was before the iPad existed. If you wanted to read a 10,000-word essay on the train in 2005, you either lugged a heavy laptop with 2 hours of battery life or you printed it. Udell chose the latter, but he did it with the precision of a typographer.
The Myth of the Paperless Office
Everyone loves to quote BusinessWeek’s 1975 article predicting the paperless office. It’s been fifty years. We still use paper. Why?
Udell argued—rightfully—that paper has properties digital files lack. You can spread ten papers across a table and see them all at once. That’s "spatial multiplexing." On a computer, you’re usually limited to "temporal multiplexing," where you flip between windows. The the printer of Udells was essentially a tool to increase his cognitive FOV (Field of View).
Honestly, the way we consume information today is fragmented. We’re constantly interrupted by notifications. A piece of paper doesn't have a notification tray. It doesn't track your eye movements to sell you ads. It just sits there, waiting for your pen. Udell often talked about "active reading"—scribbling notes in margins, circling keywords, and physically filing things into folders. This wasn't a rejection of the digital world; it was a way to make the digital world stick to his ribs.
Not Every Printer Is a "Udell Printer"
You can’t just go buy an ink-clogged $50 inkjet from a big-box store and claim you’re following the Udell method. The hardware matters. He prioritized:
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- Low cost per page: Laser over inkjet, always.
- Duplexing: Non-negotiable for portability.
- Speed: If it takes three minutes to warm up, the flow is broken.
If you look at his archives—specifically his work around 2003 to 2007—you’ll see he was obsessed with the "intertwingularity" of things. He wanted a URL on the paper to be able to take him back to the digital source. He even experimented with QR codes and barcodes on printed pages long before they were a common sight at every restaurant table.
The Cultural Impact on Tech Journalism
Udell’s focus on the printer influenced a whole generation of "productivity nerds." It paved the way for the "Read It Later" movement. Services like Readability, Instapaper, and Pocket owe a huge debt to the "printer of Udells" philosophy. They essentially took his manual workflow—stripping the junk, reformatting the text, and making it portable—and turned it into an app.
But something was lost in that translation. When we moved from the Udell printer to the Kindle or the iPad, we lost the ability to "think with our hands" in the same way. There’s a specific neuro-link between the hand, the pen, and the brain that doesn't quite trigger the same way with a stylus on glass.
How to Replicate the Udell Method in 2026
You might think this is all obsolete. It’s not. If you’re a researcher, a coder, or a writer, the the printer of Udells strategy is a legitimate "power user" move. Here is how you do it without living in 2005.
First, stop using the default print settings. Most websites look like garbage when printed. Use an extension like "Print Friendly & PDF" to scrub the nonsense. Better yet, if you’re a bit of a nerd, use a command-line tool like Pandoc to convert web articles into perfectly typeset LaTeX PDFs.
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Second, get a monochrome laser printer. Do not get color. You don't need color for reading. You need crisp, black text that doesn't smudge. Look for an old Brother HL-series or a refurbished HP LaserJet. They are built like tanks and cost almost nothing to run.
Third, embrace the margin. The whole point of the Udell printer was to leave room for your own thoughts. Use a wide-margin layout. When you read, don't just scan. Argue with the text. Write "BS" in the margin if the author is wrong. Draw a star next to a good idea.
The Nuance: When Paper Fails
Udell wasn't a Luddite. He knew paper had limits. It’s hard to search. It takes up physical space. It’s not "synced to the cloud."
His solution was a hybrid approach. He’d print to think, but then he’d scan the annotated pages back into his digital system. He was using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) before it was a standard feature on every smartphone. He understood that the lifecycle of information isn't linear; it’s a loop. You go from digital to physical to process it, then back to digital to archive it.
Actionable Insights for the Modern Reader
If you find yourself overwhelmed by the digital firehose, the lesson of the Udell printer is that you have permission to slow down. You don't have to consume everything through a screen.
- Identify your "Deep Work" material. If an article is longer than 2,000 words and actually matters to your career or life, don't read it in the browser.
- Invest in a "dumb" printer. A device that doesn't require a subscription or a constant internet connection to function.
- Create a physical "In-Box." Put your printed articles there. If you haven't touched an article in a week, throw it in the recycling bin. It wasn't that important.
- Use the "Two-Up" duplex method. It saves trees and makes the reading experience feel more like a book and less like a stack of homework.
The "printer of Udells" isn't a specific piece of hardware you can find on eBay. It’s a mindset. It’s the realization that our brains evolved to interact with a 3D environment, not a 2D glowing rectangle. By bringing information into the physical world, we give it weight. We give it attention. And in 2026, attention is the only currency that actually matters.
Start by picking one long-form essay this week. Don't bookmark it. Don't "Save to Notion." Just print it. Sit in a chair away from your desk. Grab a pen. You’ll be surprised at how much more you actually remember.
Next Steps for Implementation
- Audit your "To-Read" list: Take the top three long-form articles you’ve been "meaning to get to" and convert them to a clean, margin-heavy PDF format.
- Hardware Check: Ensure your printer settings are optimized for "Economy" or "Draft" mode to save toner, and enable "Flip on Short Edge" for a booklet-style feel.
- The Analog Feedback Loop: After reading and annotating, take a photo of your notes using an app like Evernote or Obsidian to ensure your physical insights are indexed and searchable for future projects.