LIS 386.13
Information Technologies
and the
Information Professions
Overview of
Information Storage and Retrieval,
Part 3
R. E. Wyllys
Copyright © 2000 by R. E. Wyllys
Last revised 2002 Dec 13
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
• The first commercially built computer was the
UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer).
– UNIVAC I performed about 1,000 calculations per
second. It used 5,000 vacuum tubes and weighed
8 tons (7,300kg).
– The first UNIVAC I was delivered to the U.S.
cryptologic agency in 1950; the second was
delivered to the Census Bureau in 1951.
– The first commercial purchase of the UNIVAC I
was in 1954 by the General Electric Company,
which used it to prepare payrolls.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
• Other 1950s developments in ISR included
– Increasing use of Boolean logic in searches for
InBEs relevant to an inquiry
– Aperture cards
– Optical-coincidence cards
– Edge-notched cards
– KWIC indexing
– Automated indexing and abstracting
– The first formal course in information storage and
retrieval, held in 1959
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
Example of Boolean Retrieval Using Punched Cards
• Boolean logic had been used since the 1930s
in searches for InBEs relevant to an inquiry.
• Here is an example of Boolean retrieval via
punched cards:
– Given an InBE, one can prepare a set of punched
cards each of which contains an identifier of the
InBE and, in a specific field (i.e., set of, say, 4
columns), a series of 4-character codes for
retrieval tags associated with the InBE.
– I.e., suppose we have an InBE identified by the
title "Effects of molecule X on disease Y".
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
Example of Boolean Retrieval Using Punched Cards
– We punch the title into columns 1-50 of a card (we
truncate long titles if necessary) and then punch
code 1048 into cols. 51-54 to represent the first
retrieval tag associated with the InBE.
– Next, we duplicate the first 50 columns of the card
into a second card, and into its cols. 51-54 we
punch 2236 representing the second tag.
– Similarly, we prepare a third card and punch code
4216 into its cols. 51-54, and then a fourth card,
with code 8957, for the third and fourth retrieval
tags associated with the InBE.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
Example of Boolean Retrieval Using Punched Cards
– Next, suppose we have a second InBE identified
by the title "Experimental treatment of disease Y"
and that this InBE shares with the first InBE
retrieval tags coded as 2236 and 8957.
– We prepare an analogous set of punched cards
for the second InBE.
– Now, suppose we have a card tray filled with a
number of sets of cards.
• Suppose further that the tray includes not only the sets
for the two documents mentioned above, but also sets of
cards for other InBEs
• Suppose, still further, that none of these other InBEs
happen to have both tags 2236 and 8957 associated with
them, but that some of them are associated with one or
the other of these tags.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
Example of Boolean Retrieval Using Punched Cards
– To find those InBEs in our collection that have
either tag 2236 and 8957 associated with them,
we run cards in the tray through a card sorter.
• We do the sorter runs in such a way we wind up with, in
one bin, just those cards that contain 2236 in cols. 51-54;
in a second bin, just those cards with 8957; and in a third
bin, all other cards.
– Note: This actually requires several passes through the
sorter, but the final result can be as stated.
• Such a series of sorter runs will yield a set of cards
representing InBEs that have either tag 2236 or tag 8957
associated with them. This constitutes an OR operation
in Boolean terms.
• Sorting the tray so as to yield a set of cards representing
InBEs that have both tag 2236 and tag 8957 is more
complicated (and more tedious), but can be done; i.e.,
AND operations can be accomplished via sorting.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
Aperture Cards
• Aperture cards were punched cards with curved tabs
in the right-hand third of the card arranged so that a
piece of 35mm film, containing one image, could be
inserted in, and be held by, the tabs.
– In the left two-thirds of the card, one could punch codes for
identifying the image and codes representing retrieval tags
associated with the image.
– In some aperture-card systems, the film pieces were glued in
place.
• A successful major ISR system using millions of
aperture cards was Project WALNUT, developed by
IBM in the late 1950s and early 1960s at the Central
Intelligence Agency Library, at the instigation of the
Library's director, Joseph Becker (1923-1995).
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
Aperture Cards
An aperture card
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
Optical-Coincidence Cards
• Optical-coincidence cards (also called "peek-a-boo"
cards) were sheets of opaque plastic (typically 81/2"x11" in size).
– Each 8-1/2"x11" card provided space for a 100x100 matrix of
10,000 positions in which small holes could be drilled using
precise positioning of the drill. (Some systems used larger
sheets that could accommodate a 200x200 matrix, with
40,000 positions.)
– Both rows and columns were numbered from 00 to 99. A
hole drilled at the intersection of row 37 and column 25
would represent the number 3725.
• Each card represented a retrieval tag: e.g., there
might be one card for the term "dog" and another for
the term "cat".
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
Optical-Coincidence Cards
• InBEs in a collection were represented by 4digit numbers (or 6-digit numbers in the
systems that used a 200x200 matrix of
holes).
– Suppose newly arrived InBE 4351 contained
information on both dogs and cats. Then the card
for dogs and the card for cats would be placed on
the drilling stand, and a hole would be drilled in
those cards at the intersection of row 43 and
column 51.
• Note that the dog card would already have other holes,
representing other InBEs in the collection that contained
information about dogs; and similarly for the cat card.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
Optical-Coincidence Cards
• To find InBEs in the collection that contained
information about dogs, a user needed only to place
the dog card on a back-lighted viewing stand and
note the numbers (from the row and column
numbers) of illuminated holes. Each such pair of
numbers identified an InBE relevant to dogs.
• To find InBEs relevant to both dogs and cats, the dog
and cat cards were placed on top of each other on
the viewing stand. The illuminated holes represented
InBEs relevant to both dogs and cats (in Boolean
terms, dogs AND cats).
• An inquiry concerning dogs OR cats would be
satisfied by the union of the set of numbers drilled in
the dog car and the set of numbers drilled in the cat
card.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
Edge-Notched Cards
• Edge-notched cards were invented by Calvin
Mooers (1919-1994). The cards were like punched
cards in thickness and stiffness. They came in
many sizes, but the 4"x6" size (c. 100mm x 150mm)
was quite popular because that size was popular
for general filing and hence equipment for storing
the cards was easy to obtain.
– Around the edges of an edge-notched card were small
holes, about 1/16" (1.6mm) in diameter, pre-punched
about 1/8" (3.2mm) apart and about 1/4" (6.4mm) in from
the edge. The holes were identified from left to right along
each edge by numbers in succession.
• Each card represented an InBE, and identifying
information about the InBE could be typed or written
in the interior of the card.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
Edge-Notched Cards
• Regions could be defined around the edges of the
cards.
– Suppose that you wanted to choose a region in which to
code names of authors of InBEs. Suppose also that you
were confident that your collection was unlikely ever to need
more than 4,096 = 212 different author names.
– Then you could decide to use the first 1-1/2" of the top edge
to represent authors' names, thus providing 12 hole
positions for the representation.
– Potentially, each hole could be used or not used in the
representation, so that a total of 212 different patterns would
be available for authors' names.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
Edge-Notched Cards
• Given a set of author names, you would code them
using randomly chosen numbers from 0 to 4,096.
– You would convert each author number into its binary
equivalent.
– For each InBE in your collection by a given author, you
would use a special punch to cut a V-shaped notch from the
hole to the edge of the card, in each position in the author
region that corresponded to a 1 in the binary number of the
author of the InBE.
• For example, author 221210 = 1000101001002 would be
represented by notches in the 1st, 5th, 7th, and 10th positions
in the region.
– The random choice of author numbers would help to
distribute the notches over the whole set of 12 positions.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
Edge-Notched Cards
• How would you identify all the InBEs in your
collection written by the author whose name is coded
by 2212?
– You would place the entire set of edge-notched cards
representing your collection in a tray and align them. Then
you would insert a sorting needle (like a thin steel knitting
needle with a handle) into the 1st position at the top left of
the cards, lift up the set, and allow the cards with a notch in
that 1st position to drop out of the set.
– Next, you would take the set of cards that had thus dropped
out, align them in the tray, and then insert the sorting needle
in the 5th position and again lift up. A further set of cards
would drop out.
– You repeat the operations again for each position
corresponding to a 1 in the binary representation of author
2212. The final set of cards that drop out will be those
representing InBEs whose author number is 2212.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
Edge-Notched Cards
• Similar procedures worked for any kind of retrieval
tag that a user wanted to employ in his or her
collection of InBEs.
• Edge-notched card systems worked well for small
collections, and the costs were very small.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
KWIC Indexing
• KWIC stands for "KeyWord In
Context".
• KWIC indexing could be performed
by EAM alone, although it was not till
1957 that Herbert Ohlman (19272002) invented it.
– In KWIC indexing, the title of each InBE in
a collection is punched into a punched
card.
– Then the cards are processed by EAMs
in such a way for each title, a set of cards
is produced.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
KWIC Indexing
• In the set of cards for a KWIC Index for a given
title
– The first card holds the title in its original form
– The second card holds the title, but the title begins
with the second word in the original title, and the first
word in the title appears at the end of the title.
– The third card holds the title beginning with the third
word in the original title, and the first two words appear
at the end of the title.
– In this fashion, every word in the title appears in the
first position on some card in the set. The words in
the title are cycled, or permuted, through all possible
positions.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
KWIC Indexing
• The sets of cards containing the permuted
titles for InBEs in a collection were then
sorted, usually employing the center position
for alphabetization of the titles, and printed
out.
• Ohlman called the technique “Permuterm
Indexing” or “Permuted Title Indexing.” The
name “KWIC Indexing” was coined by H. P.
Luhn (about whom more will be said shortly).
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
KWIC Indexing
• An example of a KWIC index.
– Suppose we have 2 titles to be processed:
• Understanding Computers and Cognition
• In the Age of the Smart Machine
– The KWIC index for these titles is shown in the
next slide.
• You can see that each word in both titles appears
somewhere in the list of permuted forms of the titles.
• In the KWIC index for a large number of titles, it is easy
to move down the alphabetized center to the places
where any given word you might be seeking will appear.
• Note that when you find a desired word, you also have a
context for that word. This is the reason for the name,
KWIC, for this manner of displaying titles.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
KWIC Indexing
IN THE
UNDERSTANDING COMPUTERS
COMPUTERS AND
COGNITION UNDERSTANDING
SMART MACHINE
THE SMART
THE AGE
OF THE
MACHINE IN
AGE OF
AND COGNITION
AGE OF THE SMART MACHINE
AND COGNITION
COGNITION UNDERSTANDING
COMPUTERS AND
IN THE AGE OF THE
MACHINE IN THE AGE OF
OF THE SMART MACHINE IN
SMART MACHINE IN THE AGE
THE AGE OF THE SMART
THE SMART MACHINE IN THE
UNDERSTANDING COMPUTERS
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
Automated Indexing and Abstracting
• Automated indexing and abstracting were
techniques invented by an ISR pioneer, Hans
Peter Luhn (1896-1964) of IBM, in 1958.
– An automated index for an InBE consists of a set
of index terms (i.e., subject-related retrieval tags)
determined in the following way.
• The frequencies of all the different words appearing in
the InBE are counted, and the words are arranged in
decreasing order of frequency.
• "Function" words in a checklist (i.e., words having only
syntactic, not semantic, significance, such as "and",
"the", "of", "is", "are") are deleted.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
Automated Indexing and Abstracting
• The first ni words (i.e., the ni highestfrequency words) remaining after the deletion
of the function words (where ni is the desired
size of the set of index terms) are used to
form the set of index terms for the InBE.
– Luhn's rationale was two-fold:
• The highest-frequency content words (i.e., non-function
words) would be words likely related to the subject
content of the InBE.
• All the operations described could be performed
programmatically, i.e., by a computer without human
intervention, so that sets of index terms for InBEs could
be produced quickly and easily without human effort.
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LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
Automated Indexing and Abstracting
• Luhn constructed automated abstracts in an analogous
fashion.
– An automated index (i.e, set of index terms or retrieval tags)
having been determined for an InBE, a program then counted
the numbers of index terms in each sentence in the InBE.
– The na sentences with highest numbers of index terms (where
na is the desired number of sentences in the abstract) are
displayed, or printed out, in the order of their occurrence in the
InBE, to constitute an automated abstract.
– Again, Luhn's rationale was that sentences containing a high
number of index terms would likely express key ideas within the
overall structure of the InBE.
• Automated indexes tended to be reasonably adequate
sets of retrieval tags for their InBEs, but automated
abstracts tended to be disappointing as condensed
representations of their InBEs' content.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
First Formal Course in ISR
• In September 1959 the first formal course anywhere
dealing with ISR was held at UCLA. The 2-week
workshop was developed and taught by two ISR pioneers,
Joseph Becker and Robert M. Hayes (1926- ).
– Becker was then the head of the CIA Library (a library whose
funding, resources, and degree of automation were the envy of
many librarians in the 1950s and 1960s). His Project WALNUT
has already been mentioned. After retiring from the CIA, Becker
spent many years as an ISR consultant.
– Hayes was then the head of a research project for Magnavox
Corporation aimed at developing magnetic cards whose density
was remarkably high for the time, and whose purpose was to
provide an easily sortable store of text and/or numeric information.
Hayes later served on the faculty, and as the Dean, of the UCLA
Graduate School of Library and Information Science.
– A personal note: I had the privilege of attending the Hayes and
Becker course and learned much from it.
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LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1950s
First Formal Course in ISR
Robert M. Hayes
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1960s
• The 1960s saw a rapid increase in the number of computers
using transistors, which provided great increases in speed and
dramatic reductions in size compared with vacuum-tube-based
computers. The decade also saw the invention of the
integrated circuit, which was to bring about an even more
dramatic reduction in size and increase in speed.
• In the 1960s, after a decade of disappointing results, machine
translation (MT) lost much of its allure as a field of application
of computers to textual data. Artificial intelligence (AI), i.e.,
computer programs imitating the human brain, replaced MT as
the most glamorous field for computer research in areas
related to natural language.
– As with MT, initial forecasts of the prospects of AI turned out to be
wildly over-optimistic. Only within the last decade has AI really
begun to deliver substantial results.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1960s
• The HARVEST project, sponsored by the National Security
Agency (NSA) and carried out by IBM starting in 1961, built the
first cassette-tape storage units for computer use; computer
tapes had been only reel-to-reel tapes prior to this project.
– The HARVEST cassettes were massive units about 1'x3'x3"
(30x90x8cm). They used magnetic tape that was 2" (5cm)
wide and of extremely high density for the time.
– Dozens of cassettes could be searched simultaneously
– Automated handling equipment could remove and replace
cassettes far faster than reel-to-reel tapes could be loaded.
• Note: This seems unremarkable nowadays, but it was a major
step forward in computer technology in 1961.
– The project engineer for NSA was Samuel Snyder.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1960s
• In the early 1960s, H. P. Luhn developed the first optical
storage unit for computers, the glass disk. It held about 1M
bytes--a very large memory store at the time--and was
intended to hold bilingual dictionaries for machine translation.
• In 1961 Eugene Garfield (1925- ) began publishing the Science
Citation Index (SCI), the first such index. Garfield's company
now publishes citation indexes in several other fields in addition
to SCI.
– In citation indexing, an InBE is provided with retrieval tags
consisting of the citations to that InBE made in other InBEs.
– The citations in an InBE reflect the judgment of the author(s)
about what other InBEs deal with related matters.
– Thus a citation index provides a network of links among InBEs
based on the citations found in the InBEs themselves and
incorporating human judgment; yet the citation index itself can be
prepared entirely programmatically.
– Networks formed by citation links are an interesting analog to, and
precursor of, hyperlinks as implemented in the World-Wide Web.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1960s
• In 1963, Hayes and Becker published the first book on ISR,
based on their course in ISR.
• Also in 1963, the Library of Congress (LC) established its
Information Systems Division (ISD) to begin automating LC.
– One of the first ISD efforts was Project MARC (Machine-Readable
Cataloging), whose goal was to develop computer-based tools for
disseminating LC catalog-card information.
– Project MARC's initial proposal for a computer format for catalogcard information was tested in a pilot project during 1966-1968.
– On the basis of what was learned in the pilot project, in 1969 LC
published the MARC II format. The current format, MARC 21, is
essentially MARC II plus some added features.
– The first head of ISD was Samuel Snyder, who had just retired
from NSA. When he retired again in 1966, this time from LC,
Henriette D. Avram (1919- ), also a former NSA employee,
replaced him as the head of Project MARC; she retired from that
post in 1992.
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LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1960s
• In 1965 Gerard Salton (1927-1995) initiated his SMART Project
at Cornell University.
– Under Salton, SMART served as an important test vehicle and
source of new ideas in ISR techniques for over 30 years. The
project has continued even after Salton's death.
– A key tool in SMART was the use in retrieval of thesauri of related
terms. The thesauri could be developed programmatically and
could evolve dynamically as the collection of InBEs grew.
– "Many well-known information retrieval concepts were introduced
as a result of SMART, including the vector space model,
sophisticated statistical term weighting schemes that distinguish
concepts important for text representation from other more
marginal concepts, and the relevance feedback technique for
query optimization."*
– Salton has been called the father of relevance-ranking in retrieval
procedures.
*From Computing Research News Online, November 1995.
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LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1960s
Precision and Recall
• In 1965-1966, Cyril W. Cleverdon (1913-1997), Karen SparckJones, F. Wilfrid Lancaster, and others at Cranfield University
(in Cranfield, UK) conducted under the sponsorship of ASLIB a
pioneering research effort in retrieval that defined, and
explored the use of, the concepts of precision and recall.
– The research project has come to be known as the ASLIBCranfield experiments.
• What are precision and recall?
– Suppose we have a collection of InBEs and apply to the collection
a retrieval request that yields a set of InBEs. We can call this the
"response set".
– In general, some of the InBEs in the response set will be relevant
to the retrieval request and others will be irrelevant (the latter are
often called "false drops").
– Also in general, there will be some InBEs in the collection that are
actually relevant to the retrieval request but are missed, i.e., fail to
be among the InBEs in the response set.
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LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1960s
Precision and Recall
• Using the foregoing observations about the InBEs in the
response set, we can define the following numbers. We let
Rr = the number of relevant InBEs retrieved
Tr = the total number of InBEs retrieved
Rc = the total number of relevant InBEs in the collection
• Then we can define precision and recall as
Precision = Rr/Tr ; i.e., (relevant retrieved)/(total retrieved)
Recall
= Rr/Rc ; i.e., (relevant retrieved)/(total relevant)
• We can re-state these ideas as follows.
– Precision measures how good the system is at returning mainly
InBEs that are relevant, with few false drops.
– Recall measures how good the system is at retrieving all the
relevant InBEs in the collection.
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LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1960s
Precision and Recall
• In general, high values of recall tend to occur
along with low values of precision, and vice
versa.
• Note that there can be problems in deciding
whether an InBE should be deemed relevant
to an inquiry.
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LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1960s
• In 1966 Carlos A. Cuadra (1925- ) created the
Annual Review of Information Science and
Technology (ARIST).
– The ARIST series is still being published annually
and continues to be an indispensable reference and
source of information about the state-of-the-art in
ISR. A number of chapters over the years have
been authored by UT-Austin GSLIS faculty
members and one chapter by a GSLIS doctoral
student.
– Cuadra served as the editor of ARIST for 10 years
before turning the job over to others.
– Cuadra later established one of the earliest online
search services, SDC Search. He is still active in
ISR as head of Cuadra Associates, which programs
and sells sophisticated information-management
systems, including the STAR series of programs
used by libraries, archives, and records centers.
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LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1960s
• During 1963-1968, Douglas C. Engelbart (1925- ) and his
team of co-workers at the Stanford Research Institute
originated some now commonplace but then remarkable
concepts.
– They developed the first graphic user interface (GUI) for a
computer.
– They invented the now indispensable computer mouse, along with
the concept of pointing and clicking to activate computer programs
represented by an icon on a computer's display screen.
• A wealth of information about what Engelbart and his
team accomplished is available via the following URL:
http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/MouseSitePg1.html
– Streaming video views of a public demonstration in 1968 by the
Engelbart team of the mouse and other ideas they had developed
are available at:
http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html
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LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1970s
• By the early 1970s, Douglas Engelbart
and his team (by then working at the
Palo Alto Research Center of Xerox
Corporation [Xerox PARC]) had put
together the first system that could be
called a desktop or personal computer.
– As has been noted repeatedly in histories of
computers, Xerox Corporation thus had the
opportunity to be the first company to put a
desktop computer on the market. However,
Xerox's directors failed to see the commercial
potential of what Engelbart's team had
developed.
• Engelbart continues to be active in
ISR, as head of the Bootstrap Institute
in Fremont, California.
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LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1970s
• Xerox having declined to market a desktop computer, the
field was left open for others.
• In 1975, the MITS (Micro Instrumentation Telemetry
Systems) Company, in Albuquerque, NM, marketed the
first personal computer, the Altair 8800.
– The Altair 8800 was sold as a kit via ads in such journals as
Popular Mechanics. Input was via switches on the front panel,
and output consisted of front panel lights that would be set on "on"
or "off" according the result to be displayed.
• Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the founders of Microsoft, worked briefly as
programmers for MITS.
• Apple is the best known of the personal computers that
entered the marketplace in the late 1970s.
– Other personal computers of that era included Commodore,
Kaypro, and Osborne.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1980s-1990s
• In the 1980s and 1990s things started moving so fast in
the area of ISR and computers that in this presentation
we shall merely mention trends and a few examples.
• High-reduction microimages were a feature of the the
early part of this period, when they were handled by highquality optics and high-resolution films.
– By the 1990s it was apparent that film-based systems were going
to be largely supplanted by digitized images, and much attention
was being devoted to developing ever more powerful digitalcompression techniques.
– Digitized images, with their large numbers of bytes, helped foster
the rapid development of ever more capacious storage devices,
and rapid decreases in the costs of storage helped these devices
sell well.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1980s-1990s
• The IBM PC came on the market in 1980. Because IBM made
specifications readily available to manufacturers of peripheral
equipment, the cost of hardware for PCs quickly became less
than that for Apple's desktop computers. Hence, Apple lost
market share to IBM PCs and their clones despite the initial
superiority of the Macintosh in 1983.
• At the high end of the desktop computer market, machines
made by such firms as Alpha, Sun, and Silicon Graphics
served an audience (e.g., LucasFilms) for which neither the PC
nor the Macintosh was powerful enough.
• The proliferation of powerful desktop computers supported a
broad market for office-related and professional tools such as
wordprocessors, spreadsheets, relational database managers,
and graphics and presentation software. Prices trended
downwards rapidly as the customer base grew larger and
larger.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1980s-1990s
• Medium and large public and academic libraries, and special
libraries of all sizes, adopted OPACs (online public-access catalogs)
replacing card catalogs either completely or at least for new
acquisitions.
• Library schools became schools of library and information science.
• Online retrieval services such as Dialog, Lexis-Nexis, Dow Jones,
and CompuServe, many of which had started in the 1970s,
flourished in the 1980s and 1990s.
• Most spectacular of all has been the development of the World-Wide
Web. As a practical matter, the Web can be said to have been born
in January 1993, when the first Web browser, Mosaic, was released
for public use by the University of Illinois, where a group of students
headed by Marc Andreesen had written it. (Shortly afterwards,
Andreesen helped to found Netscape.)
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 1980s-1990s
• All that we think of as the Web today has
developed in the relatively brief period
since January 1993!
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Highlights of ISR History: 2000+
• What will the future bring for ISR?
– A completely safe prediction is that
increases in the size of data stores
and in the speeds of computers and
telecommunications, i.e., increases
that we can foresee, will bring many
changes that we cannot foresee.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Sources for ISR History
• An interesting source of information on
people involved in the history of ISR in
the 20th century and later is the
Pioneers of Information Science in
North America project, originated by Dr.
Robert V. Williams of the College of
Librarianship and Information Science,
University of South Carolina.
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Sources for ISR History (cont’d)
• Three recent issues of the Journal of the
American Society for Information Science
(JASIS) were devoted to the history of ISR
and contain many excellent articles:
– Buckland, M.; Hahn, T. D., eds. Special Topic
Issue: History of Documentation and Information
Science, Part I. JASIS 48(4) (April 1997): 285-379
– Buckland, M.; Hahn, T. D., eds. Special Topic
Issue: History of Documentation and Information
Science, Part II. JASIS 48(9) (September 1997):
773-859
– Bates, M. J., ed. Paradigms, Models, and Methods
of Information Science. JASIS 50(12) (October
1999): 1043-1162
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Request for Corrections, Suggestions for
Additions, and Comments
• Corrections to this overview, suggestions for
additions (topics and, especially, images of
people and/or concepts mentioned herein),
and comments in general will be very much
welcomed.
• Please send them to me at
wyllys@ischool.utexas.edu
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions
Overview of
Information Storage and Retrieval
• This concludes Part 3 of this overview of
ISR.
• You may click below to go to
– Part 1
– Part 2
School of Information - The University of Texas at Austin
LIS 386.13, Information Technologies & the Information Professions