YEARS OF EUROPEAN ONLINE ANNÉES DE EN LIGNE ...

MEETING OF THE COUNCIL WORKING PARTY
ON LEGAL DATA PROCESSING
European Economic Area (EEA), which means that many directives, regulations
and decisions apply just as much in Norway as in the rest of Europe. the
directives and regulations that apply in Norway must be translated into Norwegian
by the ministry of foreign Affairs, and we have built a Norwegianlanguage
version of CELEX based on these documents. So our CELEX contains
English and Norwegian documents, as well as the Danish version of Sector 6
(court decisions), since EC Court decisions are not translated into Norwegian.
we established our irst CELEX system in 1990 as part of our online system.
In practice this meant that all the CELEX documents were automatically
given our structural codes, which were a subset of the SGmL family. the coding
was not very detailed, because there was not much structural detail in the
CELEX documents to begin with. But it did mean that when we established
our irst home page on the web in January 1995, we could start considering
putting our English version of CELEX up on the web. In summer 1996 we
demonstrated our CELEX on the web for the Publications Ofice in Luxembourg,
and made a general demonstration at London Online in December of
the same year. In the following years we marketed this version as a separate
system, mainly in the Nordic countries, although we had subscribers all over
the world.
mEmORIES Of tEChNICAL CURIOSItIES AND mIShAPS
when you are a host for more than 15 years, some curious things happen
along the way. Some of those things have their roots in the past. the It world
looked very, very different 25 years ago, and I think it is amazing that CELEX
has actually been in operation that long. however, these deep roots into the
past do throw up a few unexpected technological curiosities.
thE tAPES
when we irst applied for the English version of CELEX, we received a
stack of industrial nine-track tapes. the use of nine-track industrial tapes
brought back fond memories for those of us who were old enough to have
been part of the It community almost from the start. I had been a programmer
in the USA in the 1960s and among other things recall written labelling routines
for such nine-track tapes.
In 1994 Lovdata switched to Unix servers and we thought this would be
an excellent time to migrate from the use of industrial tapes to the more
convenient tape cassettes. No such luck. the tape cassette offered by the
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