In the mid-2000s, before the cloud reigned supreme and before "going paperless" became a billion-dollar industry, there was one piece of software that sat on nearly every office scanner’s bundled CD: ScanSoft PaperPort 11 .
Have a vintage scanner story? Share your memories of going "paperless" in the 2000s in the comments below! what is scansoft paperport 11
PaperPort 11 was built for Windows XP. When Microsoft drastically changed the printing and graphics subsystems for Vista, PaperPort 11 broke. It became notoriously buggy, crashing when you tried to stack documents or rotate images. In the mid-2000s, before the cloud reigned supreme
If you’ve recently dug an old all-in-one printer out of a closet or bought a vintage scanner from a thrift store, you might have stumbled across an orange-and-yellow installation disc. But in an era of Adobe Acrobat and Evernote, is PaperPort 11 still relevant? More importantly, what exactly was it? PaperPort 11 was built for Windows XP
But for those of us who grew up in the early 2000s, seeing that orange icon pop up after pressing the "Scan" button on an HP OfficeJet was the closest we got to magic.
Shortly after version 11, ScanSoft bought Nuance (makers of Dragon NaturallySpeaking). They kept the "PaperPort" name but slowly let the core visual interface rot while pushing expensive "Pro" versions.