Years ago, several technologist friends and I started considering ourselves living on the “bleeding edge” due to the technology with which we worked. I don’t recall which of us coined the phrase or if someone else did. The term played on ads talking about the leading edge of technology. You may have seen some of those ads. You will better understand why later in this article, but I thought I would give you a heads-up about the title.
When I started thinking about what to write, the “bleeding edge” immediately came to mind. It is one thing to be an early adopter (someone who likes to be one of the first in the neighborhood with a new tool or toy). It presents a different picture when you evolve into an apex early adopter and start getting your hands on products and programs that have not yet been released to the public. In their pre-release state, those products and programs will likely have issues, problems, and hiccups of a wide variety that can wreak havoc with otherwise stable systems, putting the apex early adopter at risk for considerable frustration and extra work.
As a young child, I discovered I had a deep interest in technology, particularly electronics. My first real piece of personal electronic technology, the pocket-sized transistor radio, fascinated me. I found it enticing that I could carry access to information and entertainment with me in my pocket. I took it everywhere, even listening to World Series games during elementary school classes using wired earphones. As I grew older and technology advanced, my interest continued, and I began collecting many electronics, including tape recorders, portable televisions, stereo components, etc.
Throughout my academic career, the universe of consumer electronics continued to expand at a relatively slow and steady pace. My fascination with electronics kept pace. I mostly looked at it as a hobby. I stayed on a steady course toward law school. During the summer following my second year of law school, they released the handheld pocket calculator that could add, subtract, multiply, divide, and calculate percentages and square roots. It’s basic these days, but state-of-the-art then. I was working at a financial district law firm in San Francisco that summer, and I took a morning off work to drive to an electronics store in a neighboring city to get mine ASAP.
When I graduated from law school in 1973, I went to work for a small law firm in Oakland, California. The senior partner in that firm shared my fascination with technology. We had the latest technology in our firm. Early in 1973, IBM introduced the IBM Mag Card II Typewriter. The device used an electronic memory card, which held about two-and-a-half the average length of pages of information. It had no monitor or display, so secretaries worked blind. The only way to review their input was to print it on paper. When I got there, in the fall of 1973, the firm shifted from IBM electronic typewriters to mag-card machines. I never learned how to operate one of those machines, but the fact that the secretaries could make it work fascinated me. Even without a screen, the mag card machine made things much more efficient. With a typewriter, you had to use carbon paper to make multiple copies until everyone got copy machines. The carbon paper process slowed down corrections and could not easily accommodate more than a few letter corrections without making the final product look sloppy, even with the use of “white out.”
A few years later, Radio Shack released its TRS-80, a large desktop computer. Around the same time, Westlaw introduced online legal research. We got a TRS-80 and a 1200 Baud modem to access Westlaw’s online database. We were one of the first firms to do that. The system worked painfully slow, when it worked at all. It went through many growing pains to get to where it now stands. Comparing Westlaw in the 1970s to what we have today looks like comparing a log cabin to a high-rise building. Comparing a 1200 Baud modem to the high-speed Internet connections we use today looks like comparing a bicycle to a Ferrari. Notwithstanding the growing pains, researching online using a computer generally expedited the process.
I later got one of the first cell phones for my car that predated the phones with batteries, and you could only use it in the car as it was permanently mounted. When portable mobile phones became available, it should not surprise you that I immediately got one. It had the size and weight of a brick, and each battery lasted approximately a half hour. I remember carrying a phone and three batteries that weighed more than the laptop I used to write this article. It was not a pocketable device, so I had to carry it in my briefcase.
Why even bother with the earlier phones? The alternative meant finding a pay phone, which often had little or no privacy for even the most basic communications. Granted, we had more pay phones available in those days, but I felt that having the technology saved the same time, and it ultimately opened the door to the invention of today’s multifunction cellular devices.
When personal computers emerged, my interest in electronics moved me to acquire one early in the game, and Entertainment provided the first experience most of us had with the personal computer. I had bigger plans, though; I intended to see what I could do with it to make my personal life easier, and I planned to learn how to use it and figure out what it could do to allow me to work it into my professional life. My first computer, an Apple II +, was an electronic marvel in its day but is as archaic as a stone knife compared to the smaller, sleeker, and vastly more powerful computers we use today. I found it so fascinating, and it attracted so much of my attention that it moved my wife to ask me, “If it’s so good, can it take you dancing on Saturday night?” Not being totally obtuse, I made it a point to take her out to dinner that weekend, but I spent the rest of the weekend playing with my new toy. Long before I figured out how to use it in my office, I found software that let me keep my personal tax and accounting records. Eventually, that grew into keeping the law firm’s accounting records on a computer. The world changed dramatically as online legal research evolved, and we got word processing software. The word processing software allowed a lawyer to review a document on the screen and make changes to the document directly, without having to manually mark up a document and then have a secretary translate it into the document. I soon decided that offered a much more effective and efficient way to complete documents, and my office system evolved into my dictating a document, the secretary transcribing the dictation into a word processing document, my revising it on the computer, and the secretary cleaning up the mess I made of the formatting and printing out the final version. The process went faster, and the quality of the work product improved as I found it easier and faster to make the changes on the computer and, as a result, felt more inclined to make changes that I felt would improve the document even a little.
Most lawyers at this time had little interest in engaging in such a process, in no small part due to a lack of keyboard skills. In those days, most men did not know how to type. When I took a typing course in high school, the class was overwhelmingly female.
Early on I decided that I had a strong preference for Apple’s operating systems compared to Microsoft’s DOS. I stuck with that decision for my entire career (I still prefer the Mac OS to Windows and the iOS to Android).
By the time I became the senior partner at my firm, I had already decided we needed real computers in the firm and on the desks of every lawyer, every secretary, and the office manager. In evaluating the situation, I considered that my love of technology made me a unicorn in the firm, as all the other lawyers suffered from varying degrees of computer phobia. Simply put, some of them could accept having computers on the secretaries’ desks, seeing them as glorified mag card machines. None of them wanted anything to do with a computer on their desk. However, I saw the potential for using computers for word processing legal research, and accounting, including billing.
When Apple announced the Macintosh during the 1984 Super Bowl, it caught my attention. I decided to go with the Macintosh for our office as I thought it had more potential than other “personal” computers, both because I preferred Apple’s operating system and because I felt pretty sure that my computer-phobic partners and associates would not adapt well to using DOS and would likely respond more favorably to a computer that woke up smiling at you.
I set our office up that way in late 1984 or early 1985. I networked 128k Macs to a daisy-wheel printer and a 10-megabyte shared hard drive - it really was 10 megabytes, and about a dozen people shared it. The Macintosh office proved so rare that I could find no one willing to string the AppleTalk cables used to connect everything. Everyone backed away, claiming unfamiliarity with AppleTalk. I ultimately spent a Saturday stringing the cables myself, which did not take that much effort. I connected everything up and powered the system on, and it worked. Rumor has it that ours was the first exclusively Macintosh law office in California and possibly the United States.
Going with the Macintosh computers ran against the grain as most law firms adopted DOS-based systems. Using the Macintosh in a law office took some extra effort in the early days because you needed different software to interface with the DOS and the Macintosh OS. Because most law firms used DOS systems, most legal software vendors designed programs for DOS. As a result, I often had to find workarounds and other programs to do what we needed to do. It took extra effort, but it worked, and I considered it a good trade-off as my computer-phobic partners and associates started using the Mac on their desks more and more.
As my reputation for respecting technology in the law office grew due to my writing and teaching about it, I started getting invitations from software and hardware vendors to try out their equipment and programs so I could write about them. Eventually, software developers started asking me to consult with them about the structure of their programs, and I did a fair amount of “beta testing” for new programs and some hardware. I got great satisfaction from participating in developing software programs and helping shape them for greater convenience and functionality for law firms. I considered it both a service to my profession and an interesting hobby.
I have taught classes about technology and law and written articles and books about it for over 30 years. I have seriously been in the “life” for at least that long and toyed with it for most of my life, starting around 10. As I observed my 75th birthday last December, that’s a pretty good run, and I have not quit yet. Technology remains a fascinating hobby for me.
I have heard for many years that people tend to become more risk averse as they age. As I aged, I lost my patience for pre-release products and the risks they create; I guess that’s me growing more risk averse. I stopped doing beta testing and stopped working with pre-release products several years ago. Now, I limit myself to reviewing products and software already on the market, letting others take over the frontlines of frustration. While not completely devoid of risks, it mitigates the exposure.
Looking back over my life with technology, I see many high points and a lot of frustration. If I had the opportunity to return and choose again, would I do it the same way? YES!
