When I heard this week that most credit card transactions soon won’t require a signature, I was reminded of an experiment I once conducted. Curious to see if I would recognize their handwriting, I asked four friends to send me a postcard, each with the same greeting: “Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.”

My guinea pigs included a real estate agent, an architect, a fellow journalist and a porn star. My score? A big old zero: I couldn’t identify a single one.

Handwriting, once one of the most instantly identifiable elements of an individual, seems to have been lost to the ages, trampled into dust under the relentless advance of keyboards, touch screens and voice recognition software. Now the signature — the crown jewel of penmanship — is headed for the same ash heap. With the stroke of a virtual pen, American Express, Discover, Mastercard and Visa pronounced that even our laziest scrawling John Hancocks are no longer needed.

Am I surprised? Not one iota.

After all, Americans now send millions of holiday e-cards, and birthday greetings arrive mostly via Facebook. Emails have largely replaced personal letters. Even that marathon of document signing, the house closing, has moved on: When I bought a home last year, I never once put pen to paper. I used DocuSign, which creates a valid legal “signature.” DocuSign’s website trumpets its benefits: “Sign documents anywhere from any device”; “No overnighting, faxing or waiting”; and, of course: “More secure than paper.” (Not so much on that last one — in May 2017, DocuSign admitted that a database of customer email addresses had been breached in a phishing campaign.)