CAT Corner!
The profession of court reporting is thousands of years old; its roots can be traced back to 63 B.C., when Marcus Tullius Tiro employed shorthand reporting as Cicero's secretary.*
Why "scopist"? In the earliest stages of computer-aided transcription, all processing occurred on minicomputers. Although economical enough for businesses, these computers often cost as much as an average house and had very expensive maintenance contracts, so they weren't generally owned by individual court reporters. Rather, reporters would own their dictionaries and magnetic media but use the computers and computer room provided by the court reporting agency or courthouse that they worked for. These minicomputers had harsh green phosphor screens that displayed only six or eight lines of text at a time, so they were elongated rectangles which resembled an oscilloscope (Google that one -- I did!), so the screen became referred to as a "scope." Scopists were people who worked at the scope.**
*RDS-legal.com**Scopistry, History of Scoping (Chapter 1, History)
"I believe that English is an incredibly rich language. We in the court reporting field are among the last bastions of hope to save this language. Turning out a correct and well-punctuated transcript is what helps keep electronic recording at bay."
-Margie Wakeman Wells,
-Margie Wakeman Wells,