The Genesis of NASA
RECON
William Mitchell
Professor of Information Science
University of Arkansas at Little Rock
This is the story of a new computer company in
the middle 1960s that had innovative ideas and
proven leadership, but missed a golden
opportunity.
This is the story of a half-dozen men who played
a pivotal role in the development of scientific
information systems, simply by bringing them
into existence when the “experts” doubted their
feasibility.
This is also the story about an untold story that
has been consistently misreported in the literature,
illustrating again that the winners write history.
The Bunker-Ramo Corporation
• The Martin-Marietta Electronics Division in Maryland was merged
early in 1964 with TRW's Computer Division in Canoga Park.
Together they formed a private company, The Bunker-Ramo
Corporation, 90% owned by Martin-Marietta.
• In 1964 John Parker was president of Teleregister Corporation, a
publicly traded corporation headquartered in Stamford, CN that offered
on-line technology to the airline and brokerage industries. Parker was
also a member of the Board of Directors of Martin-Marietta where
George Bunker was the president. Bunker’s career was in aerospace
and he was a good friend of Simon Ramo who had proposed creating
Bunker-Ramo. Parker convinced them that the smaller Teleregister
Corporation should be merged into Bunker-Ramo.
• Herbert Mitchell had joined Teleregister at Parker’s invitation in
August of 1962 as VP for Advanced Research. Parker, Luther Harr,
Teleregister’s VP for Marketing, and Mitchell had worked together at
Univac. Mitchell worked on Teleregister’s airline seat reservation
systems products and designed a high-speed switching computer that
was proposed to the National Security Agency in 1963.
Dr. Simon Ramo deserves
recognition as a statesman
and executor of US high
technology. He co-founded two
Fortune 500 companies. One
of these was TRW [initially
Ramo-Wooldridge in 1953], an
enormously successful
defense electronics firm that
put together the complex
systems required for the first
American intercontinental
ballistic missile. The other
company was Bunker-Ramo,
a computer venture [founded in
1964]; Allied Corporation, now
Allied Signal, acquired it in
1981.
Herbert F. Mitchell, Jr.
Ph.D. Applied Mathematics,
Harvard, 1948 (helped Howard
Aiken build the Mark II)
Joined Eckert-Mauchly on
November, 1949 and continued
with Univac and Sperry Rand
until 1959 (chief programmer
on the UNIVAC I, later sales
manager)
• 59-61 Honeywell.
• 61-62 Collins Radio
•62-66 Teleregister/Bunker-Ramo
•67 TRW
•67-71 NASA: Goddard Space
Center.
Three Independent Divisions
• Parker became Chairman of the Board of a new, public BunkerRamo on July 6, 1964 and Simon Ramo assumed the Presidency.
Milton Mohr headed the computer group in Canoga Park that was
experienced in government contracting.
• For two years Mitchell had been commuting bi-weekly from
Los Angeles to Stamford and now asked to join the Canoga Park
group. He was made staff VP charged with commercializing that
division’s expertise. The new company was scrambling for
business as the Teleregister was the only profitable division and it
was loosing its airline reservations business to IBM while
continuing to maintain its position in the brokerage quotation
business. Simon Ramo was interested in on-line information
retrieval and that fall he suggested to Mitchell to explore how the
Teleregister division’s expertise in on-line desktop
communications could be brought to bear on this problem.
•“I conceived the idea of combining several [computer-based
information systems ] into a single service, and set up a project to
develop the idea.”—Mitchell autobiography
The NASA Proposal
• The Unsolicited Proposal for the Direct Electronic Library, describing
centralized Electronic Reference Centers distributing citation data to
distributed users via telephone lines was delivered to NASA at the end
of 1964. NASA subsequently issued a public solicitation to
implement a prototype system.
• “Meanwhile, NASA advertised for bidders to provide a pilot system
of remote information retrieval for their many centers across the
nation. This seemed to me to be an ideal way of getting started in the
broad field I had been proposing, and persuaded our management to
bid on the contract. I also persuaded management to do the
programming without charge so we could have proprietary rights to it
when the contract was completed.” —Mitchell autobiography
• On April 12, 1965 Mitchell distributed 6 copies of a detailed
functional specification of the operation of the Direct Electronic
Library (Simon Ramo also received a copy).
Melvin S. Day joined NASA in
1960 as Deputy Director, Office of
Technical Information and
Education, and became Director,
Technical Information Division in
1962. He reorganized and expanded
the information services that NASA
had taken control of from the
National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics. He also contracted
Documentation Inc. to develop a
science-technology information
processing center and contracted
American Institute of Aeronautics
and Astronautics to provide
information about published,
nonfederal literature in the space
sciences. --www.libsci.sc.edu/bob/ISP/
NASA’s Vision for Bibliographic Retrieval
Van A. Wente directed systems development for Day and plotted the
strategy for introducing on-line retrieval (called the Retrieval Dialog
Study--Simpson & Flanagan, 1966). Under Wente NASA had already
placed in many field center libraries duplicate copies of the documents
indexed at headquarters. “The documents, in nearly every case, could
be viewed immediately either as journal articles, books, proceedings,
full-size reports, or microfiche…back to 1962” (Wente, 1971). These
duplicate libraries were under-utilized because of the effort involved in
manual searching the paper indices, so the missing piece was on-line
citation searching, which NASA had already decided to call RECON,
short for REmote CONsole (Bourne & Bellardo, in-press). Dissemination
of access to NASA’s citation collection, precisely as Mitchell’s
proposal described, would permit in most cases not simply the
identification of a document that could be delivered in several days, but
the alerting of a local librarian who could supply the document within
the hour! “Indeed, any failure to have full document text available
would clearly break the full chain of feedback and iteration which online systems usually employ” (Wente, 1971).
A batch searching service was offered by NASA on an IBM 1401, and
W. T. Brandhorst of Documentation Inc. reported in 1966 that DI “has
prepared, edited, and delivered over 1000 searches in 1965, all of
which, if not exclusively machine searches, received their major
contributions from a machine search.” Imagine Day’s excitement in
1964 at Bunker-Ramo’s suggestion that over 50,000 searches per
month could be conducted from any NASA facility in the country at a
cost of $1 each!
NASA knew that there were still other organizations with interest and
technology appropriate to mounting a bibliographic retrieval system of
this scale so Wente developed specifications that “in April 1965
resulted in NASA’s issuance of a request for proposals to develop a
prototype system employing the full NASA collection, then about
200,000 documents, in a realistic environment of research libraries
with direct use of the system by working NASA scientists and
engineers. By a formal competitive process, NASA selected the
Bunker-Ramo Corporation to conduct the test principally at three
NASA locations using remote terminals and programs owned by that
company and operated through a UNIVAC 1050 computer located in
New York City” (Wente, 1971).
Reflections on the
Beginnings of Dialog
The Birth of Online Information Access
by Roger Summit
In 1964 an event occurred that would alter
computing and information retrieval forever — a
third-generation computer was introduced by IBM,
the IBM 360 series. Third-generation computers
were the first computers that combined mass
random access disks, CRT terminals, and
telecommunications and as such, ushered in
interactive computing. What this meant for
information retrieval was that massive databases
could be stored centrally and access could be
offered worldwide. The idea of services to a
global marketplace from an efficient, centralized
computer facility was unheard of at the time but
was exciting beyond belief.
http://library.dialog.com/chron/2002/0006/1020628.html
Did You Know ...
The name for the
system, "Dialog,"
occurred to me in
1966. My wife
Ginger and I, with
our two babies,
Jennifer and Scott,
were on our way to
Portland to visit her
parents. She was
driving and I was
dictating a project
plan, for what was
to become Dialog,
into a small, voiceactivated tape
recorder. But what
should the project
be called? The
system was to be
interactive between
human and
machine. The
searcher in a sense
said, "This is what I
want," and the
machine replied in
effect, "This is what
I have." Described
that way, we
decided — why not
call it "Dialog." And,
that was it!
—Roger Summit
I arranged a meeting with Mel Day in Washington D.C. in 1965. During
the meeting, Mel responded to my description of the utility of Dialog
by explaining that he had a dozen or so people a week describing
systems that could do most anything short of reading your mind.
He said he had to see it in operation to believe its effectiveness.
After further discussion I offered to submit an unsolicited proposal to
install Dialog on the NASA database and conduct an evaluation of the
approach at the Ames Research Center in Mt. View, California. He
responded by issuing a request for proposal (RFP) in April of 1965
incorporating the features we had discussed. We submitted a bid.
Much to our chagrin and enormous disappointment, we learned that
Bunker Ramo had also submitted a proposal and had been awarded the
prototype contract. As this contract was to be our avenue to proof-ofconcept as well as a vehicle for becoming independent of Lockheed
independent research funding, I felt we had lost a major opportunity, and
we needed to come up with another alternative. I decided we should
submit a very low-cost proposal, one within Mel Day's discretionary
funding limit, for a parallel experiment, arguing that this way NASA would
have a backup in case the Bunker Ramo system didn't work out to their
satisfaction.--http://library.dialog.com/chron/2002/0006/1020628.html
A summary of the interesting bidding process is reported as follows:
•In 1964 after some discussion with Mel Day of NASA, Roger
Summit prepared a proposal to NASA to use DlALOG for the
automation of the NASA information system.
•Daniel Sullivan of Bunker Ramo also bid on the proposal and
received the award to develop the prototype for the later Bunker
Ramo System. The initial request for proposals asked for 20 ideas
in the system specifications. At that time DlALOG included 19 of
these ideas.
•Undaunted, Summit prepared an unsolicited proposal for a
parallel experiment to be run between the NASA-Ames Research
Center and the Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory.
•NASA specified a dial-up teletype protocol and purchased the
Bunker Ramo equipment to support the project. After two years,
the Bunker Ramo experiment proved unfruitful and NASA
dropped it.
---http://library.dialog.com/chron/2002/0006/1020628.html
The NASA Contract
“In 1964, after discussion with Day, Summit prepared an unsolicited
proposal to use a Lockheed-developed online search system for
automating the NASA information system. Unknown to Summit,
Simon Ramo of Bunker-Ramo had also talked to Day and Wente
about the same issue, and had also submitted an unsolicited proposal
(Wente, 1995). NASA responded by issuing a Request for Proposals
in April 1965 to develop a prototype online system that was to
employ the full NASA collection (then about 200,000 documents), in
a realistic library environment with direct use by scientists and
engineers (Hlava, 1978).” –Bourne, unpublished book
• Bunker-Ramo approved the submittal of the prototype proposal
developed by Mitchell, including not charging for programming.
Contract NASW 1369 was awarded to Bunker-Ramo in the Fall of
1965 that called for NASA to fund the conversion of their data and
the rental of demonstration equipment and telecommunications costs
for a two month trial of NASA RECON.
• We can surmise based upon published descriptions of other
prototypes that Bunker-Ramo proposed the most ambitious test.
The unsolicited proposal had described setting up a nationwide
network to connect 15 NASA installations employing 34,236
personnel. In a single center configuration these CRT consoles would
communicate with a single computer and its disk file controller, which
limited to 100 the number of concurrent searches that could be
accomplished across the system. A single center system was projected
to cost $54,500 per month and provide for 54,500 searches per month
to NASA at the targeted $1 per search, with a peak capacity of
350,000 searches. A three-center system was estimated to cost
$108,500 per month, hence providing 108,500 searches at $1 each, but
having a peak capacity of 1,050,000 searches per month. If 12
centers were configured, the cost grew to $349,000 per month with a
peak capacity of 4,200,000 searches (over 5 searches per workday for
every NASA employee).
Mitchell described a search strategy based on isolating a list of
accession numbers by specifying a primary attribute (author, title,
source, date, etc.) and then refining that list by applying key words:
“The computer at the center will attempt to match each such key word
against a master list containing all indexed key words for the chosen
category plus all anticipated synonyms of these. As each successive
key word is entered, the computer responds with a rejection indication
if it fails to identify the key word, or the number of articles which are
associated with that key word (or its synonym) and all earlier accepted
key words. Further restrictions upon selection may be imposed by
specifying inclusive dates of publication, role status of the key word,
type of article, size of article, sophistication of treatment, etc., as is
deemed desirable. Each specification adds to cost of indexing, of
storage, and of selection. When the number of isolated articles has
reached a sufficiently small value, the user requests display of titles,
and then proceeds as described for a direct reference [display of the full
citation and instructions for ordering the full article]” --Mitchell, 1964
Implementation
• NASA contractors provided magnetic tapes off an IBM
1410 in Suitland, MD, for the two years of citations that
had been published in bi-weekly printed indices. This
collection was updated with a new tape bi-weekly for the
duration of the project and the citation collection that was
growing at 2000 documents a week reached 275,000
citations by the date the trial began.
– It took several months to work out with the contractors the format of the tapes.
Mitchell wrote the file inversion program that ran on a GE computer in Canoga
Park and created files for the Univac 1150 that was to host the Bunker-Ramo
consoles with all of the citation records on its magnetic drum. New tapes
were shipped from California to NYC with each update from NASA.
• When the conversion program was completed and the backlog
converted in May 1966, Mitchell drove to NYC with 50 reels of tape
and a Users Manual titled NASA/RECON---COMPUTER/
LIBRARY AT YOUR DESK. It was then up to four programmers at
work in Maryland to complete and test 60 program modules.
Two-Month Trial
• Six NASA centers used 23 consoles via telephone lines to conduct
on-line bibliographic searches for two months starting in October
of 1966. Two reports document the trial:
– NASA/RECON User's Manual: A Test Operation for Remote Console Retrieval
of Scientific and Technical Aerospace Information Conducted by Bunker-Ramo
Corporation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Scientific and
Technical Information Division. October 1966 [NBS #: 6624976].
– Evaluation of the User Reactions to a Prototype On-Line Information Retrieval
System, Meister, D. and Sullivan, D. J. (of the Human Factors group at BunkerRamo Corp). Published October 1967. [NASA Contractor Report Number: NASA-CR918]
• Three major areas of user dissatisfaction identified in the evaluation
– User Manual ambiguity concerning deletion of query terms and the manner of
implementation of the OR function
– Sluggish system response to the “Transmit” key.
– Dismay with the indexing system: “RECON users were brought into very close
personal contact with the characteristics of the present indexing system; this intimacy
caused them to attribute some of their dissatisfaction with indexing terms to RECON”
(Meister, 1967).
Success
• Van Wente, however, looked at the nearly 350 successful
searches per week and concluded that “the test showed
that working scientists and engineers both could and
would use a hands-on retrieval terminal, and further, that
they could obtain useful results directly with no intermediary personnel and only a minimum of instruction”
(Wente, 1971). NASA was very pleased.
• “In addition to its significant performance in its primary
role, RECON was successfully utilized to (1) update the
very bibliographic collections upon which it is based, (2)
trace the evolution of work in a given field, (3) provide a
chronological record of an author’s work, and (4) trace
the history of corporate involvement in a given field”
(Meister and Sullivan, 1967).
Productivity Unmatched for Two more Years
Lancaster and Fayen (1973) begin their review of Meister
and Sullivan’s report with “Over a 7 week experimental
period a staggering 6133 uses were recorded at six
separate NASA centers.” Other reviewers seem not to
understand that no other online bibliographic retrieval
system accumulated that number of uses (or that
number of hours) for at least two more years (for the
first 80 hour DIALOG test at Ames Lancaster cites
Summit’s report that the system was down 24% of the
scheduled time and in all 96 searches were completed. In
a subsequent 12 month trial at NASA headquarters only
13% of the 300 scheduled terminal hours were lost and
approximately 300 searches were conducted).
Business and Politics
Milt Mohr was not interested in his division getting into commercial
ventures but had tolerated Ramo’s request to host Mitchell. He
refused to contribute his research funds to the RECON project and
had only allowed the GE computer to be used third shift to
accomplish the file inversion.
Luther Harr had set up an east coast service bureau for brokerage
houses and wanted to commit a significant piece of the Univac
1050 to this operation, which was much more profitable than the
rates that NASA was paying to run the prototype.
Before the trial began Simon Ramo stepped down and Milt
Mohr became CEO of Bunker-Ramo and Harr continued as
Executive VP. Mitchell was asked to leave the company.
NASA had no funds to commit to ramping up the prototype, but they
asked to continue month-to-month at the contracted rate. Mohr
doubled the cost of extending the trial on the pretext of recouping
the losses of the low bid, but never expected that NASA would
accept the new terms. Bunker-Ramo owned the programs for the
project and the data files, but NASA had the project documentation
and experience with the system acquired under the test contract.
What If…
• Simon Ramo had pushed Milt Mohr to put BunkerRamo’s resources behind the RECON project?
–The test would have been hosted on a modern computer and
implemented in nine months instead of sixteen.
–The user’s manual would have been implemented as designed.
• Bunker-Ramo had pursued its relationship with NASA?
–Mitchell, instead of Roger Summit, would have had proof
of concept and momentum to move to the delivery of other
databases.
–Bunker-Ramo had the networking experience and marketing
ability to offer on-line access to bibliographic data anywhere in
the country, reliably, and inexpensively (it took Summit three
years to learn how to scale up network access).
Recognition of
Dr. Herbert F. Mitchell
Questions & Comments
Search procedure implemented for trial
Allowed to delete only last term specified
BRL 1964, TELEREGISTER TELEFILE,
APPLICATIONS General purpose computing, on-line and real-time uses
such as Banking, Airline Reservations, Communications Switching,
Passenger-Record Retrieval; these on-line systems work with nationwide
communications networks consisting of high-speed (up to 1,200 bits sec)
and low-speed (up to 200 words/min) facilities. Switching, terminating and
transceiver apparatus for these networks are provided by the manufacturer.
RELIABILITY, OPERATING EXPERIENCE Teleregister on-line systems
have been operating with a record of 99.8% up-time since 1952. The
systems employ duality and built-in controls to maintain reliability, coupled
with rigid preventive maintenance. They have on-line capability for 24hours
per day, 7- day per week service.
INSTALLATIONS
Processors
United Air Lines, Inc., Denver, Colo.
Trans World Air Lines, New York Idlewild
Howard Savings Institution, Newark, N.J.
Union Dime Savings Bank, New York, N.Y.
Society for Savings, Hartford, Conn.
Teleregister TeleCenter, 75 Varick Street, New York, N.Y.
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The FASTRANDtm II
The FASTRAND II random-access mass storage system was one of the most
impressive peripherals ever attached to a commercial computer. Used with the
UNIVAC 1108 computer, it provided the first permanent file storage capability in the
UNIVAC 1100 series family.
No UNIVAC programmer who ever encountered No UNIVAC programmer who ever
encountered a FASTRAND is likely to forget it. It was big, heavy (it weighed about
two and a quarter tons, and required special reinforcement of the raised floor it sat
on), had a large window lit by flourescent lights which let you see the two huge
drums rotating in opposite directions at 880 revolutions per minute and the heads
jumping back and forth as various tracks were accessed
1963: UNIVAC 1050 is a solid state, character addressable computing
sub-system. It has a basic magnetic core memory of 8,192 six-bit
alphanumeric characters that can be expanded in modules of 4,096
characters to a maximum capacity of 32,768. The 1050 was designed
to supplement the parallel processing capabilities of the UNIVAC III,
490 Real Time, and 1107 Thin Film Memory computing systems.
IBM 360 Computer
IBM System 360, Model 30, Memory size: up to 64K bytes, 1965
(3 times faster processor and memory access speed than the 1050)
Disk vs. Drum in 1965
IBM 2314 STORAGE CAPACITY
llem
Per cylinder
Per disk storage
Disk storage drives
Per IBM 2314module
8
Cylinders
200
1,600
Tracks
20
4,000
32,000
Bytes (alphameric characters)
145,880
29,176,000
233,408,000
Packed decimal digits (numeric only)
291,760
58,352,000
466,816,000
Transfer rate
312,000 bytes/sec
Average Seek Time
85 milliseconds
FASTRAN II Drum
Bytes
132,120,576 6-bit characters,
Transfer rate
100 kilobytes1 per second
Average access time
92 milliseconds
Read/write heads
64, on a movable boom between the two drums