Interim Technical Report : Storage and Retrieval of Technical Information
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: The Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania Sept 1963. First Edition. Variously paginated. 10 7/8 x 8 3/8 inches. Publisher's white printed wrappers with cut out window to view title. Comb bound. Soiling to the wrappers, internally clean. This example with number '00126' stamped on title page. Near Fine. Comb. [29788]
Moore School Report No: 63-22. "This report covers work under Task 3 - Study of Mechanization of Technical Files Consisting of Image Information which is part of the Multi-List Project supported by the Informatin Systems Branch, Office of naval Research under contract NONR551(40). Work on Task 3 is directed by Dr. H.J. Gray [and preparted by] Andreies van Dam [under his direction]"
An interesting interim report which describes challenges to overcome in retrieval and storage of material (initially for the Air Force) and a desire to create a system "suitable for implementation on existing digital computers" and which could "reduce the bulk of hardcopy storage by at least two orders of magnitude", and "yield rapid and accurate retrieval of documents, from request to hardcopy, in less than 2 minutes per document for a 50 million page file."
The author expan ded his interest in the field of information retrieval and access, working with Ted Nelson and others with the discovery of hypertext:
"Andries "Andy" van Dam (born December 8, 1938) is a Dutch-American professor of computer science and former vice-president for research at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Together with Ted Nelson he contributed to the first hypertext system, Hypertext Editing System (HES) in the late 1960s. He co-authored Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice along with J.D. Foley, S.K. Feiner, and John Hughes. He also co-founded the precursor of the ACM SIGGRAPH conference. Van Dam serves on several technical boards and committees. He teaches an introductory course in computer science and courses in computer graphics at Brown University. Van Dam received his B.S. degree with Honors in Engineering Sciences from Swarthmore College in 1960 and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963 and 1966, respectively....Van Dam is perhaps most known as the co-designer, along with Ted Nelson, of the first hypertext system, HES, in the late 1960s. With it and its immediate successor, FRESS, he was an early proponent of the use of hypertext in the humanities and in pedagogy. The term hypertext was coined by Ted Nelson, who was working with him at the time. Van Dam's continued interest in hypertext was crucial to the development of modern markup and browsing technology, and several of his students were instrumental in the origin of XML, XSLT, and related Web standards." (Wikipedia)
The Moore School was home of the famous Moore School Lectures and was a major research computing hub at the this time - a natural partner to work with. Rare, with only a few entries in Worldcat.
PROVENANCE:
From the library of Artificial Intelligence Pioneer Ray Solomonoff (unmarked)
Price: $350.00