HOW WORK HAS CHANGED
When I started med school in 1982, it was Index Medicus. It came in monthly volumes, at the end of the year replaced by an annual volume. And I beieve that every five years, the annual volumes were reprinted as a 5-year single volume. You looked up topics or author names in tiny, tiny print. You hand wrote what seemed of interest. You found the bound volume, the article, and read the abstract and weighed whether or not to xerox it at ten cents a page. You went back to the lab with your xeroxed stapled articles.
By later in med school, 1987, you could book an appointment with a reference librarian, who would design a key word search online. I believe it charged your grant $50 (with inflation today $150.) You got a printout of the results, probably on a long roll of teletype paper. If you needed articles, back to the stacks and the xerox machine.
Around the time I taught at Northwestern, 1997, PubMed was opened up free online with abstract [Al Gore speech]. And rapidly thereafter, more and more articles were also available in PDF form (but not free - dependent on your medical library's subscription).
Around 2004, you could walk into the public medical library at UCLA, use PubMed, and wherever possible, download the PDF article to a thumb drive to take home. (No enrollment or library card needed).
By 2020, many articles were free, either if older or because of open access journals.
So the business of learning science, reading, thinking, designing experiments (or review articles), sits on top of a vastly changing infrastructure.
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Changes in law firms and law retrieval would echo PubMed (Westlaw, etc).
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One could also compare the film industry, where all editing was done on physical film that was yards long (omg) and transitioned to all digital. This transition was only recently in the 1990s.
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The art of script writing and editing switched from paper and typewriters and mimeographs to electronic word processing in the 1980s. Hugely different and more efficient if inserting a paragraph in the middle of a 20 page scene.
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