In the early days of transcription, doctors, lawyers, businessmen (not yet businesswomen) initially dictated chart entries, letters, etc., to secretaries who wrote in shorthand and then as quickly as they could, because their shorthand relied a lot on memory (you've heard of one's handwriting getting cold), typed the written notes using a manual typewriter.
The dictators aimed their dictations to their secretaries until the late 1800s to early 1900s when the dictation machine, linked back to Thomas Edison, was introduced, which eliminated the need for the secretary to employ shorthand. Also, the dictations were able to be transcribed not just by the secretaries who had once taken the shorthand notes but by those who had the skills to do such. These machines are said, however, to have had very poor sound quality.
By the 1960's the Mylar tape was used for recording and provided much better sound quality and, we are sure, happier transcriptionists, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and, yes, now some businesswomen too.
Today microcassette tapes are quickly being replaced with digital handheld recorders that allow dictation to be transferred to a computer and accessed by the transcriptionist to be transcribed. Call-in systems are also quite popular, in which the dictator is given a number to call via telephone and dictate, even without the need for a computer for storage, and the dictation is stored digitally off-site for the transcriptionist to access via computer and transcribe.
The transcriptionists used their "manual" typewriters until the late 1960s when the electronic typewriter became widely used, and shortly thereafter, with technology drastically changing, the word processor came along and allowed whole pages to be input, checked for errors, and then printed; thus, eliminating the carbon paper and carbon copies (note that we still use the "cc:" for copies of documents being sent to those other than the addressee).
Finally, in 1981 the personal computer was introduced to the marketplace, after its history of the first electronic digital computer being designed and built in the winter of 1937-38, with the first large scale electronic digital computer (weighing 30 tons) being introduced in the early 1940s. Then, in 1945, we had the first use of stored programs - the origin for computers that have since been manufactured. In 1951, computers were commercially available. The first LAN (local area network), allowing computers to communicate and share software and peripherals, such as printers, was introduced in 1975. Again, all bringing us to the first personal computer of 1981; we have since been rapidly advancing with technology.
Today, at the push of a button, we are able to, what would seem to the early pioneers of transcription, almost effortlessly produce our documents. A cut, copy, paste, insert, delete, tab, indent, align, underline, center, and so forth is done with the click of a mouse. In the early years, what would have been a task of much time and effort, now seems undemanding.
Transcription Plus, LLC is pleased and capable of meeting our client's demands with the today's most modern tools and the experience necessary to provide an ABSOLUTELY ACCURATE product.
