The printouts were 'records' in a sense, even if they lacked the contextual information for any one outside the area that produced them to decipher them. But they weren't electronic. Things have changed. Computers are now not just for specially trained technicians. The vast majority of people have one on their desk at work and possibly one at home.
Some people now do their work from home and communicate with the 'office' via a modem.
Computers have become smaller, faster, cheaper, portable but probably more critically can now 'communicate' with each other. More specifically technological change impacts on the established electronic environments as hardware and software undergo evolutionary processes at an exponential rate. At the hardware level changes to both machinery and capability as well as to storage media are in some cases an almost annual event. In the process of upgrading systems it is usually the practice for only the data which is 'live' to be migrated to the new platform to meet current business needs. The non-current data will often not be migrated at the same time.