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Harvard Law School banned students from using portable computers during exams -- just about 30 years ago this summer.
It's true. At the time, "portable" did not mean tablets and smartphones, but rather the Osborne 1 -- a 25-pound PC the size of a suitcase, which had a 5-inch black-and-white screen and no batteries -- you plugged it into a standard wall outlet. Two students who wished to use their Osborne portables to write their exams but were told by university officials that their computers represented unfair advantages over other students who used typewriters or simply paper and pen.
One of the computer-owning students, Tony Downer, was quoted by the Osborne company's official magazine, Portable Companion, in its August/September 1982 issue. He defended technology and provided context: "The Osborne successors are going to cost less and less, making them similar to the calculators of today. At one time a calculator was a luxury item, today anyone can afford one," he noted. "I opened the door on the 21st century and they slammed the door on my face," Downer said.
I was reminded of Downer's story this week when CNN contacted me to ask some questions about computer history. A crew from CNN visited the InfoAge Science Center, in Wall, N.J., where I lead a wing devoted to the history of computing. CNN's producer asked what I do for a living, so I explained my role as a reporter for Law Technology News, and then a thought occurred to me: There's got to be some lessons for lawyers in computer history! It was then that I remembered reading, a few years ago, about the Harvard-Osborne story.
A simple search on the web turned up Downer at Oak Investment Partners in Greenwich, Conn., from where he talked to me by telephone on Wednesday.
"I confess that when I think back on the decision that the dean of students at the Harvard Law School made, I still just chuckle at how faulty their logic was behind their ruling," Downer said. "I would suspect based upon her demeanor that she was about as technologically ill-informed and inexperienced as anybody on the planet."
That's not surprising for the early 1980s. "In theory, if you had a big supply of floppies and an enormous amount of time, you could go ahead and write out paragraphs and pages of speculative replies to speculative questions," Downer observed. But, he said, "That's absurd -- it's absolutely absurd." The Osborne had such limited memory and processing speed that it would've been a struggle to copy-and-paste the right answers. An optional hard drive wasn't even on the market yet, he noted.
"They didn't know what to make of it. They basically said, 'We're not going to punish you, but we're not going to permit you'," Downer explained. "That showed all of the insight and all of the forward thinking of a rock." But now, he observed, "My iPhone has how many orders of magnitude of greater technical capability than that Osborne 1? Memory, processing speed, storage, access to information … talk about cut-and-paste opportunities!"
The only technological impairment, Downer said, was when he wore a Walkman radio to drown out the sound of other students' typewriters. He was distracted by the local rock station playing Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman" but did fine on his exams.
A few years later, Downer was permitted to use a similar computer at Harvard Business School. The business school professors understood the power of microcomputers to change the world: Two other students, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, studied at HBS while inventing the VisiCalc spreadsheet program in 1978. In fact, Bricklin still writes software today that's widely used by lawyers.
The moral is plain: Embrace technology, don't fear it. In 1982 it was suitcase computers. Osborne went bankrupt a few years later, but portable computers obviously survived. In 2012 the new scary technology is predictive coding. Perhaps in 2042 we'll have debates about robots in the courtroom.
For now, as you'd imagine, computers are widely used at Harvard Law School. But maybe not for long, given the rise of mobile and cloud-centric devices. "The personal computer is dead," wrote Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches law and computer science, and co-directs the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at Harvard University.
That, then, is the end of the beginning of this story.
Evan Koblentz is a reporter for Law Technology News. Send e-mail or follow him on Twitter.
