Technology in the Court in its 50th year By Michael Gething (Judge) and Stephan van Heerden (Associate)
It is perhaps fitting that an article on technology in the District Court over its 50 year history be written by authors representing the current and future generations of the Court. According to the District Court website (which in the year 2021 is an acceptable method of ascertaining the truth… or at least one version of it) the District Court of Western Australia was established on 1 April 1970 upon enactment of the District Court of Western Australia Act 1969 (WA). Notwithstanding the date, this occasion was no practical joke. The needs of the rapidly expanding 16 | BRIEF APRIL 2021
population of Western Australia required the establishment of an intermediate court to alleviate some of the pressure being experienced by the local courts and the Supreme Court. The history of the Court is relatively well known, and if it’s not known, that information is relatively easy to access, all thanks to technology. At this point we think it is quite appropriate
to look at what the “technosphere” looked like in the 1970s. According to Wikipedia (a whopping 30 years younger than the District Court), the world’s first general microprocessor, the Intel 4004, came out in November 1971. A microprocessor is the brain of any computer or computer like device. The Intel 4004 had a clock rate of around 750kHz. The most recent iPhone 12 Pro, has a processor speed of around 2990 MHz, which is about a million times faster. At this point we would have loved to have said something about Moore’s Law,
