Court Reporters

Okay, here's the deal: I am so old that I knew a genera of early humans called court reporters before CART became an industry. Court reporters are the direct ancestors of CART reporters, who evolved into a distinct species only over the past few decades in the Galapagos Islands. That's why the ALDA Galapagos chapter has some of the finest captioning on the planet. There are so many CART reporters there that the beaches are littered with stenograph machines. Recent studies indicate that three giant tortoises have learned rudimentary CART.

I'm from the Jurassic Period of real-time, when it was primarily done by court reporters in the seclusion of courtrooms and without display devices. (Fossil evidence of transcripts date to the mid-Triassic.) I came upon this secret society by happenstance. Ancient Chicago ALDAns had begun using a primitive tool called ALDA Crude in self-help groups. The invention of computer manchild Steven Wilhelm (Nevets computicus), ALDA Crude consisted of a simple PC connected to a television and a good, or at least speedy, volunteer typist.

Somehow word of Steven's mischief got around, and I received a call from Jerry Miller, chief shaman of the National Court Reporters Association (NCRA). Jerry's office was in downtown Chicago, only a few blocks from where I worked. We got together for lunch and he told me all about these strange creatures who used an abbreviated keyboard device, inputing a kind of code that enabled them to keep pace with multiple speakers and produce a verbatim record of the conversation after it ended. Subsequently, Jerry took me to the federal courthouse and showed how a court reporter might hook up such a stenograph device to a monitor so that words were displayed in real-time.

The implications astounded my late Jurassic brain. For most species of late-deafened adults, this was the communication equivalent of discovering fire. Court reporters controlled this fire, and thus became our gods.