In this 1994 photograph, a young Bill Gates demonstrates the amount of data that can be compressed onto a single CD-ROM, compared to the volume of paper required to print it.
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The choice to shoot in a forest — with towering stacks of paper resembling tree trunks — was no accident.
It was meant to illustrate the enormous contribution of the digital age to forest conservation: a genuine reduction in the number of trees felled for paper.
As manufacturing processes improve, the amount of data we can compress into a single square millimeter keeps growing, and with it, more and more forests are spared from destruction.
And yet, in the years since that photograph was taken, something has changed.
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Humanity's computing power consumption is rising steeply, and energy consumption along with it.
Delivering the vivid, high-quality content that streams across our screens requires vast server farms — voracious consumers of electricity and prolific generators of heat.
Enabling technologies like Bitcoin and artificial intelligence turns enormous tankers of fossil fuels into smoke and carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere.
In this new era, computers are no longer a convenient substitute for paper and ledgers. Computers are creatures unto themselves, with an insatiable appetite for fuel.
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Technology continues to improve — and so does energy consumption and chip efficiency.
But the reversal of the trend in which computers went from saving trees to destroying them is no longer something we can undo.