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Old 03-22-2016, 07:42 AM   #44
johndallman
Night Watchman
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
Default Re: 1980s American Cars, Guns, Gadgets and Consumer Goods [Atmosphere, look, minutiae

Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander View Post
Carry around databases of tire tracks, fibers or other forensic evidence, to aid in recognising them, giving a bonus to specific Forensics checks?
They don't have the storage or the displays to do that. All these example computers have monochrome displays; good colour displays, with 16 million colours, are a late 1990s thing.

There are commercial databases available on dial-up, each with their own arcane search engine. But they're things like abstracts of scientific journals, not law-enforcement information. They are also expensive to use, about $5/minute. They're being replaced by CD-ROMs as of 1988, and were later replaced by the web.
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