January 22: An Old Book

[kinetic_elaboration]

We found this cool book in the library today about doing legal research and other legal work using computers and digital technology. It was from 1987. There was a diskette in the back. The diskette was separately itemized and barcoded, which I found pretty weird but also interesting. We obviously have no way to get the data off of it.

But the book is still readable. It was a wild ride on basically any page I flipped through, including:

Explanations of what a keyboard and monitor are

A special note on how the “l” is different on a computer keyboard versus a typewriter keyboard (don’t use 1 and l interchangeably)

You can use Lexis and Westlaw on more than one computer at once, sort of like a party line!

Legal databases (? I already kind of forgot) named Genie and, my personal favorite, The Source. Like the villain on Charmed!

An explanation of a spreadsheet. Excel listed as an also-ran among spreadsheet software

Commands for DOS computers

The care and feeding of diskettes

Soon computers will be cheap enough that you can have one at your office and another one at home

Ominous subheadings like “you’ve gone too far”

One might quite legitimately ask what this basically useless-to-lawyers book is doing in a law library and the answer is: we have not weeded in way too long. There are others like it out there. I will say I got kind of attached to it, as a historical object. A lot of this information probably IS lost to time outside of these books, but it’s not legal information per se it’s meta-information. It’s information-about-information. It’s information as thing, wait that’s not right. I wouldn’t say it’s in our purview to preserve but it was nifty to look at.