Before HP brought us the low-priced ink-jet printer all office printing was black.

FORBES: Will Meg Whitman be more like Steve Jobs, or Carol Bartz? HP's future is at stake

Both our art and our literature go to great pains to destroy our illusions and remind us that they are merely ink on paper or oil paint on canvas.

FORBES: The Unhidden Machine

Except for a few paid columnists and staffers on Forbes Woman, none of us makes a dime from the digital ink we spill daily.

FORBES: Asking for a Favor and Paying it Forward...A Real Time Experiment

Like many of the e-book readers that followed, it used e-ink - an innovation developed by a US company of the same name.

BBC: Bend me, shape me: Flexible phones 'out by 2013'

There has been a great deal of ink spilled on the various options available to us.

WHITEHOUSE: Press Briefing

Cunning, and a good test of an artists ink-based handiwork, or -- call us cynics -- photoshop skills.

ENGADGET: Alt-week 2.24.13: Mapping the brain, discovering dark matter and our inevitable, grizzly end

But for those of us who came up in an era when a glossy hunk of paper and ink was a thing to behold, the tangible result of a hardworking group of professionals operating in a weekly cycle that felt as natural and inevitable as the tides, this is a day for memory and regret.

FORBES: Newsweek and me

Today's electronic forms of communication may lack that emotional depth but they do enable us to connect more speedily and efficiently than I at least could manage with pen and ink.

BBC: A Point of View: Mourning the loss of the written word