More 1960s CALR Resources

Its really no great feat to find old articles with half-baked predictions about the future use of technology, but cleaning out some old notes for an old project I’ve since abandoned, I found this article and quote that, with an upcoming birthday, stands out since its roughly as old as I am:

“On the horizon is the direct translation of voice into digital form for machine manipulation. The lawyer of the future may be able to make an inquiry into his phone to a computer located far away and secure an immediate response to his query. The response may be verbal, or in the form of a display on a TV monitor in his office, or even in the form of a high-speed print-out from an electrostatic printer in his office.” James S. Winston, The Law and Legal Education in the Computer Age, 20 J. Legal Ed 159, 161 (1967).

(I had to google “electrostatic printer” to find out what that meant.)

Two minor interesting points are that this article anticipates that “[o]n the horizon” the lawyer would still have to use a computer “located far away” and that the lawyer would most likely still be male (“his phone”).

I only scanned this article, and I’ve come across several others like it, but all the materials it cites are well after the 1960 reference to CALR I wrote about last month. Still need to do a thorough literature search and possibly try to find some IBM corporate history to see if they were the first to make a workable CALR system.