Every year, America’s office workers print out or photocopy approximately one trillion pieces of paper. If you add in all the other paper businesses produce, the utility bills and invoices and bank statements and the like, the figure rises to 1.6 trillion. If you stacked all that paper up, it would be 18,000 times as high as Mount Everest. It would reach nearly halfway to the moon.

This is why HP Inc.’s acquisition of Samsung Electronics Co. ’s printing and copying business last week makes sense. HP, says a company spokesman, has less than 5% of the market for big, high-throughput office copying machines. The company says the acquisition will incorporate Samsung’s technology in new devices, creating a big opportunity for growth.

Yet by all rights, this business shouldn’t exist. Forty years ago, at least, we were promised the paperless office. In a 1975 article in BusinessWeek, an analyst at Arthur D. Little Inc., predicted paper would be on its way out by 1980, and nearly dead by 1990.

The reality is the high-water mark for the total number of pages printed in offices was in 2007, just before the recession, says John Shane, an analyst at InfoTrends, which has tracked the printing and document creation industries for the past 25 years and who compiled the eye-popping figures cited above.

To say we haven’t gotten the paperless office so far isn’t to say we won’t. It is always dangerous to say “this time it’s different,” but this time it just might be. For the first time in history, there is a steady decline of about 1% to 2% a year in office use of paper. Add in the dip in use during the most recent recession, and as of 2016, we are already 10% below the peak of the number of pages produced by office printing and copying in 2007.