 Most Memorable Career
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Herbert Ohlman
It all came together for me in 1958 at the International
Conference on Scientific Information (ICSI). A paper* I had submitted for
ICSI, "Subject-word letter frequencies with applications to superimposed
coding," was accepted by the chairman of Section 5, H. P. Luhn. Later,
I received a set of preprints of all the conference papers.
Meanwhile, working with colleagues at the System
Development Corporation (SDC), I had developed a system of mechanical indexing
for SDC and Lincoln Laboratory documents. As a public demonstration of
the capabilities of Permutation Indexing, I persuaded SDC to support an
all-out effort to index the ICSI preprints in time for distribution at
the Conference.
We distributed "A Permutation Index to the
preprints of the International Conference on Scientific Information" on
the first day of the conference. At the same time, Luhn of IBM and colleagues
from their Service Bureau Corporation distributed a "Bibliography and index:
Literature on information retrieval and machine translation" which contained
"titles indexed by Key Words-in-Context system" - subsequently known better
by its acronym, KWIC. |
We produced our index entirely with IBM tabulating (punched-card) machines,
but Luhn used punched cards only for input, converted the data to punched-paper
tape, and used a computer to produce the final index. However, the appearance
of the printed indexes was practically identical.
Similar systems were developed during or just after World
War II, but this must have been the right moment for mechanical/computerized
indexing to go public.
* The work leading to this paper had been done while I was employed
by Carrier Corporation.
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