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« NRA bylaw changes | Main | Growth in "constitutional carry" »

Computers and the law

Posted by David Hardy · 24 January 2017 03:45 PM

I just came across an 1977 issue of the legal journal Case and Comment, which has an article about using computers in the practice of law. It casually mentions that they are the size of a refrigerator, and can be used for word processing and billing. "A computer capable of doing the operations cited in this article can be obtained for about $25,000. [$99,000 in 2016 dollars] More advanced models may exceed $300,000 to purchase. [upwards of a million in modern money]"

Software would cost $2,000 to $10,000 -- $8,000 to 40,000 in modern terms.

The first legal computer I saw was in the office of Margrit Cromwell, now sadly deceased, here in Tucson, around 1980 or so. It was indeed huge, ran on 8" floppy disks (no hard drives) and cost her $15,000, if I recall correctly.

3 Comments | Leave a comment

Flight-ER-Doc | January 25, 2017 12:21 PM | Reply

Back in 77 my mother was a word-processing supervisor for a small-medium sized law firm (20 or so attorneys)...she was using something a little more sophisticated than the IBM Mag-Card Selectric Typewriter, IIRC the system she used actually had a screen (monochrome) and used cassette tapes for storage. It was called Lexa-something, maybe.

Prior to that the IBM MT/ST and Mag-card systems used magnetic tape cassettes, with linear storage, and then things that looked rather like 1/2 sized punch cards made of floppy disk material as storage, printed and viewed via a selectric typewriter, and less than a page worth of RAM...The MT/ST was in place from the mid-1970's, on.

old guy | January 26, 2017 9:08 AM | Reply

In the early 1980's not too long after the first PCs came out the was a word processing package called Multimate based off the version that had been on the wang computers. Multimate had different industry paks which would add features need for that particular industry and the Legal profession was one of them. It was some what pricey IIRC ( I seem to think $5,000 for a 5 user version) but was consider a terrific step up in getting things done.

old guy replied to comment from old guy | January 26, 2017 1:39 PM | Reply

boy if I could type I would be dangerous - sigh

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