Say you want to take credit card payments at the home office or away, anytime. What are your options with today's mobile and wireless technology (March 2006)? Various hardware terminals now have wireless Internet connectivity, but they are still just hardware. Remember the IBM Selectric typewriter (and wastebaskets full of crumpled paper)? No? Good! They disappeared when we moved word processing to the computer instead. Are credit card terminals going the way of the Selectric? With computer word-processing, we could store and reuse documents, and combine them with other software. Credit card processing is now moving to the desktop (and laptop) computer for much the same reason. How? Instead of the highly-programmed hardware terminal, you put a software program on your everyday laptop or desktop computer. Card swipes? Attach a simple credit card reader by plug-n-play USB. A number of desktop software programs have been widely used for this. One of the top terminal makers just bought the biggest of them. The terminal makers know where this is going. On the desktop, transactions can be searched, filtered, sorted, formatted, printed, reported, exported to a spreadsheet, or sent to other software. Include your free-form notes in the transaction history. Look up repeat customers by any transaction detail or identifier of your choice. Subtotal your transactions by card type and date for bank account balancing. Swipe cards through the pocket-sized USB reader, and print receipts at any plain-paper printer. Not just better, but cheaper too. Away from the office? You already know the wireless options for your laptop. Your laptop will always have more wireless options than a credit card terminal can keep up with. And when you're outside the reach of all wireless options, laptop credit card processing can store transactions for later, when you can connect again.