Law Firm Automation – in 1972

By Doug Hafford – VP Consulting Services, Afinety, Inc.

In 1972 I was a sophomore at Grossmont High in La Mesa, California.  Most of my interests at that time had little do to with the legal industry and more to do with sun, surf, sand and my basketball career.  I was only able to grow to 5’10” and the NBA was standoffish so I eventually found my way to IT consulting.  Looking back, it is hard to imagine how a staff person in a law firm in 1972 could see into the future but the seeds were indeed there.  So let’s look back and see what exciting technology was available.

The IBM Typewriter

When I formally started in the business, a lot of what we did was to replace IBM typewriters with Personal Computers.  The IBM "Selectric" II Typewriter introduced in 1971 (ten years after the original Selectric), featured a number of additions to typing technology. Its unique "dual-pitch" mechanism enabled the typists to switch from ten-pitch (ten characters per inch), commonly used for routine correspondence, to twelve pitch (twelve characters per inch), for use in typing business forms.  By merely switching a lever, a change in pitch can be made in a matter of seconds, and all on the same typewriter!

Another feature of the IBM "Selectric" II Typewriter was the IBM Tech III Ribbon. Enclosed in a snap-in/snap-out cartridge, the mylar ribbon only had to be changed five times yearly as compared to the 64 changes necessary with the previously used carbon ribbon.  Revolutionary! 

In 1973, the IBM Correcting "Selectric" Typewriter became the first machine in the history of typing to actually make typing errors disappear from original copies. Equipped with a special "Lift-Off" tape, the typewriter enabled a typist to simply "lift-off" erroneous characters from typed copy.  By depressing a correcting key the "Lift-Off" tape removed the ink impressions from the paper, allowing the operator to simply type in the correct character and continue typing. 

For work involving extensive revision, the IBM Mag Card II Typewriter was introduced in 1973. Its electronic memory could hold up to 8,000 characters (about 2 ½ pages of typing). Once in memory, the information could be recorded on magnetic cards at about 200 characters per second – blazing speed for those times. The typewriter’s memory then allows for making revisions without retyping. Regardless of whether the changes consisted of one word or a whole page, only the changes had to be typed, saving time and producing consistent documents over and over.  For the first time, the industry saw the typewriter become essentially a printer able to reproduce a stored document.

Graphical User Interface

In 1973, Xerox PARC developed the Alto personal computer.  It had a bitmapped screen, and was the first computer to demonstrate the “graphical user interface” (GUI).  It was not a commercial product, but several thousand units were built.  The Alto greatly influenced the design of personal computers during the late 1970s and early 1980s, notably the Apple Lisa and Macintosh!

The Xerox Machine

In the 1970’s law firm’s utilized a fairly tried and true solution to reproduce documents that began in 1949 when Xerox Corporation introduced the first xerographic copier called the Model A.  Xerox became so successful that, in North America, photocopying came to be popularly known as "Xeroxing."  Xerographic copier manufacturers took advantage of a high perceived-value of the 1960s and early 1970s, and marketed paper that was "specially designed" for xerographic output.  The first electrostatic color copier was released by Canon in 1973.

The Facsimile Machine

By 1972, technology introduced (and patented) by the Xerox Corporation in 1964 was really beginning to take off.  By the late 1970s, many companies around the world entered the fax market. Very shortly after a new wave of more compact, faster and efficient fax machines would hit the market. Xerox continued to refine the fax machine for years after their ground-breaking first machine.

In 1972, Stephen Dorsey, Founder and President of Canadian company Automatic Electronic Systems (AES), introduced the world’s first programmable word processor with a video screen. The real breakthrough was that the machine stored the operator’s texts on magnetic disks. Texts could be retrieved from the disks simply by entering their names at the keyboard.   This technology was not used in law firms until much later, but the very beginnings of today’s desktop started here.

As you can see, things were fairly primitive back in 1972 and yet the law firm somehow got along.  The legal world was filled with paper, staples and black and white text.  Compared to today’s goal of just about every firm of the “paperless” office – the push back then was to be able to produce paper documents at all.  But things had started moving and moving rapidly.  By the 80’s PC’s were making their way into law firms and I got my start putting in PC’s to replace IBM typewriters. 

Today, as we move toward the cloud and device independent computing it is interesting to note that in 1972 the very first use of the “@” sign was introduced.  A guy named Ray Tomlinson wrote a program to enable electronic mail to be sent over the ARPANET (the predecessor to today’s Internet). It is Tomlinson who develops the ‘user@host’ convention, choosing the "@" sign arbitrarily from the non-alphabetic symbols on the keyboard.