The Court Reporter's Guide to Cyberspace: Excerpt

This is an excerpt from Chapter 15 of The Court Reporter's Guide to Cyberspace, which should give you a feeling for the content and writing style of the book. For more information, take a look at the online table of contents.
 
NOTE: This was written in 1996!

Realtime Online

an excerpt from The Court Reporter's Guide to Cyberspace

Court reporters write realtime in a number of environments: onto their CAT screens, into word processors, onto television screens as closed captions, and on projectors. It was only a matter of time before someone routed that realtime into cyberspace.

Early experiments all centered around CompuServe. Most, if not all, of the groundbreaking advances in online realtime described in this chapter have been recorded for posterity and uploaded to the CRForum libraries, where you can download them and review the full text of the session.

The earliest experiments

Jerry Lefler of Digitext fame was probably the first to try realtime online. He designed a steno machine called the "Impression," with a 286 computer in it, and routed its output to the keyboard input of a computer. This was designed to work with a word processor, but with the appropriate access software, it let him run realtime directly into a CompuServe conference.

Using Lefler's approach, no court reporting translation software actually needed to be loaded onto the computer. The Impression machine did the translation; and fed the text directly into the keyboard port of the computer. As far as the computer was concerned, it functioned like a really fast typist was at work! Lefler ran several online tests, but his technology was never extensively used for CompuServe access.

Using the Gemini with EasyBridge

Further experiments were performed using the Gemini realtime steno machine, and a live conference was held in August of 1994. Gary Robson (your author du jour) helped his wife, Kathy, by setting up a template to run from her Gemini into TAPCIS. Later conferences used a program called COEXPERT (Conferencing Expert), which is described in Chapter 12 "CRForum Conferencing"), and several other conferences were conducted that way.

Writing realtime into CompuServe with a Gemini is done using the EasyBridge software that comes with the writer.

Strokes written on the Gemini go into the first serial port on the computer, where EasyBridge intercepts them and turns them into either words or commands. It then feeds those to another program running on the PC - in this example, TAPCIS. TAPCIS believes this information to be coming from the keyboard, just as if there were a very fast typist working. It is the same philosophy as Lefler's Impression, but implemented in software rather than hardware.

The text of the Gemini conference is available in CRForum Library 10 (Vendors and CR Firms) as GEMCO.ZIP, and the transcript itself explains in more detail how the process works.

Realtiming the Vice President online

The big unveiling of realtime into cyberspace occurred in November of 1994. California State Senator Barbara Boxer set up a conference in Washington, D.C., for California business leaders. One of the guests was Vice President Al Gore, speaking on the subject of "Building the Information Superhighway." When Gary saw the Vice President's name on his conference invitation, it seemed like the ideal opportunity to use this technology. At first, the Vice President's office resisted the idea of realtiming the speech onto CompuServe. They felt that if it wasn't being broadcast on television or radio, it shouldn't be broadcast on CompuServe, either. Eventually, both Senator Boxer and Vice President Gore agreed to have their speeches realtimed.

Realtime reporter Jack Boenau from Sarasota, Florida, agreed to handle the realtiming, and he and Gary flew to Washington. Richard Sherman (your other author du jour) reserved a CRForum conference room.

On the morning of the speech, Jack Boenau and Gary Robson were present at the Russell Building in Washington, D.C., and the world was at their computers and logged into CRForum's Conference Room 2, renamed "V.P. Gore Conference" for this historic event. Everybody anxiously awaited the scheduled 12 noon, EST, commencement.

A last-minute discovery that all of the phone systems in the Russell Building are digital didn't stop things, although Gary ended up (much to the dismay of the Vice President's security detail) stringing his modem lines behind the stage to be used by Senator Boxer and V.P. Gore, and into a little phone booth in the kitchen.

Once the hookup was complete, Jack Boenau provided entertaining and informative narration to online participants, describing the scene in Washington, the security clearances, the snarling dogs trained to lunge for the jugular at the sound of an unfolding tripod.

And the speech in Washington was read on computer screens across America as it happened. Here is the beginning of Senator Boxer's introduction of the Vice President (taken directly from the transcript):

SENATOR BOXER: One thing I wanted to mention to you, which is terrific, today's speech by Vice President Al Gore is about building the information superhighway, but the Vice President isn't just talking, however. The speech, part of the seminar put on by yours truly, is being tr ansmitted live onto CompuServe, one of the information services that make up the prototypical information superhighway. So as we sit here right now, because of these terrific people, with about a two-minute lag, they will be receiving the speech. Oh, I'm sorry, a two-second interval. They will be receiving the speech. See, I have to catch up. You're so far ahead.

The last comment was directed at Jack and Gary, as they gave a thumbs-up for the correction on delay time. How fitting it was that the first major national "broadcast" of this type was on the subject of the information superhighway! In the words of the Vice President himself during this address:

The changes that are now underway within our society and within our civilization as a result of new information technologies is very difficult to overstate. These changes are of the same order of magnitude as those changes which accompanied the invention of the printing press, except that these changes will not be strung out over centuries. Instead, the impact will be telescoped into only a few years.

From around the country and the world, reporters and lay persons witnessed a remarkable event. Sitting thousands of miles away, everyone could participate in an event otherwise accessible only by those in attendance. Those online could watch the words of the Vice President scroll across computer monitors, and though no questions were entertained from the general public during this session, individuals sitting at computer keyboards had the capability to ask questions, offer input, or cast votes in an election situation, if permitted to do so.

Everything worked beautifully and an entirely new arena opened up for realtime reporters through the melding of two technologies: online communications technology and this latest breakthrough in reporting technology.

The full text of this speech, with Senator Boxer's introduction and closing remarks, is available in CRForum Library 2 (Reporting Interests) as GORECO.ZIP.

Online realtime with a Stentura

Soon after the Boxer/Gore conference, Stenograph Corporation provided a way for users of the Stentura steno machine to write realtime into a CompuServe conference room. This made its first major debut with a contracting debate at the STAR user group meeting in New Orleans in April of 1995. Court reporters who were interested in the issues surrounding contracting by deposition firms but weren't able to attend the conference were able to tune in to a CRForum conference room and follow the debate as it hap pened.

The reporter, Karen Schoeve, realtimed the debate, which was made available in a CRForum conference room and in the meeting room.

The text of the STAR debate is available in CRForum Library 2 (Reporting Interests) as DEBATE.ZIP.

A wedding in cyberspace

Now, let's take a brief break from the humdrum world of government and technology and look back to the start of a fun story in 1992, when a court reporter in Seattle named Deanna Baker called the Cheetah technical support hotline at two in the morning. She spoke to a support rep named Scott Smith, and the call began a long relationship. The bulk of their courtship took place through e-mail, and they didn't meet face to face for quite some time. Deanna, by then, had moved to Atlanta, Georgia. She took a few days of vacation on the way to her new home, and flew to Tucson to meet Scott for the first time.

Soon thereafter, the two of them were workin g together at a SHHH (Self-Help for Hard-of-Hearing Persons) conference, where Deanna received a "Friend of SHHH" award for her captioning work. After her award, Scott came up on stage and, in front of 600 people, proposed to her. Luckily for him, Deanna accepted.

Now we can fast forward to November of 1995. Since so much of their courtship took place online, and since so many of their friends were in the CRForum, they decided to have the wedding online. Kathy and Gary Robson were invited to set up and perform the realtime. As the guests arrived physically, Kathy described the scene for the virtual visitors online. The ceremony was realtimed, and then the CompuServe conference screen was shown at the wedding on a large-screen television, so that guests could type in their messages to the happy couple.

While it may not be the most significant event ever to be realtimed online, the wedding was certainly the most fun - and probably the most appropriate! The transcript of the wedding is available in CRForum Library 12 (Fun & Games) as WEDDING.TXT.

Realtime onto the Internet

So far, we've just discussed realtime onto CompuServe. The same mechanisms that allow realtime text to be directed onto CompuServe can allow that text to be sent to the Internet, using IRC (the Internet Relay Chat - described in Chapter 24) or directly to the World Wide Web. Various methods for sending captions o nline had been used by Sun Microsystems, using Alison Hoyman as the reporter and her husband, David, as the techie.

As far as we know, however, the first actual use of realtime on the IRC was in late 1995 when Gary and Kathy Robson connected to the server at the Discovery Channel and realtimed an interview with a news reporter just returning from Haiti. The technology was basically the same as what was used for CompuServe, running a piece of custom software developed by Cheetah.

In early 1996, Cheetah modified its server to support multiple output channels, and redesigned it so that any captioner could connect to it using a modem and their captioning software.

This server is now being used every week for a Discovery Channel interview program that is simultaneously sent out on the Internet and America Online. On the Internet, the broadcast has both text and audio, using a product called RealAudio from Progressive Networks.

Realtime onto the Internet really hit the big time, however, on February 21, 1996, at the E-Mail and Web World convention in San Jose, California. More than 70,000 attendees had the opportunity to stop by a booth in the lobby of the San Jose Convention Center to watch live interviews from the show floor being written in realtime. The realtime text was not only displayed right there on the convention floor, but piped onto the World Wide Web al ong with pictures and live audio. This display was set up by a company called WebChat Communications, and the realtime used Cheetah Systems' Internet realtime server. The realtime was provided by a talented Bay Area reporter named Theresa Darrenougue.

Now that the technology has been developed, new applications for it are coming up every day, and I'm sure by the time you have this book in your hands there will be a lot more success stories.

The Court Reporter's Guide to Cyberspace
by Gary Robson and Richard Sherman
ISBN: 0-9651518-0-8
350 pages
Trade softcover
1996 CyberDawg Publishing