International Business Machines

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is a major US-based computer company.

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) was founded as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in 1911 and renamed International Business Machine Corporation in 1924. It specialized in punch card equipment until World Work II, but had built up a patent position in electronics. IBM, nick-named "Big Blue," then became dominant in computer hardware and software in the second half of the 20th century. IBM equipment was very widely used in information technology infrastructure, including for information storage and retrieval systems. For more on IBM see "IBM" Wikipedia [1].

This article is limited to IBM's direct contributions to documentation and information retrieval services.

Contributions to documentation

Microfilm rapid selectors

IBM promptly acquired rights to the US Patent for Emanuel Goldberg's "Statistical machine" (USP 1,838,389. 29 December 1931) after Goldberg assigned his rights to Zeiss Ikon. James W. Bryce, IBM's Chief Scientist, was developing IBM's patent position in this area including his own statistical machine patent (USP 2,124,906. July 26, 1938). (Buckland 2006, 161).

Keyword in Context (KWIC)

A concordance is a index to all of the words in a book, excepting insignificant words enumerated in a "stop-list. Concordances to the Bible pointing to chapter and verse are well-known form.[2] In 1864 British librarian, Andrea Crestadoro proposed indexing using words in text as a rapid and economical method for indexing.

At IBM Hans Peter Luhn recognized that punch card systems were suitable for this routine method for generating indexes and, importantly, that valuable explanatory context could be automatically added by showing adjacent text immediately before and after each term. This became known a KeyWord In Context (KWIC), with variant display formats "out of context" (KWOC) and "alongside context" (KWAC). KWIC and its variants were widely used until computing became a lot less expensive. [3]

Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI)

"Selective Dissemination of Information" (SDI) refers to current awareness services that automatically notify readers when documents that match their stated interests are acquired and indexed. This was also developed and popularized by Hans Peter Luhn[4]

Walnut

The Walnut Information Retrieval System was microfilm rapid selector system using small strips of film ("chips") instead of long rolls. Long rolls, as used in the Statistical Machine developed by Emanuel Goldberg and the Microfilm Raid Selector designed by Vannevar Bush depended on time-consuming serial search of one or more rolls and for that reason did not scale well. Something much closer to random access to locate specific documents directly could be approximated by a two stage process: First retrieve the right chip, then find the right location on that chip. Jacques Samain's Filmorex was a well-known example. However, scaling up to very large collections was difficult and expensive because it required extreme engineering precision at high speed, but this is what the Minicard system of Kodak and IBM's Walnut system tried to do.

Walnut used chips [5]. A prototype used cells containing 50 strips of ultraviolet-sensitive, heat developed Kalfax film. Strips are 0.005 inch thick, 15 inches long, and 0.9 inch wide, and contained 200 images in four columns of 50 images each, for a total storage of 10,000 full pages of information per cell. Addressed by punched IBM photocards, which serve as the output vehicle. A hook with two fingers [6] would snatch each strip.

The System was intended to provide immediate access to any of the two million document pages contained in the two hundred cells making up a module of the File. The photocards may be viewed for simple reference, or hard copies may be made on commercially available printers.

Six copies of the Walnut system were reportedly supplied at US government agencies, but advances in digital computing and digital storage gradually displaced microfilm in retrieval systems.

Individuals involved with IBM include: Howard H. Aiken, Steve Furth, Manfred Kochen, Herbert M. Ohlman, Israel A. Warheit and Herbert S. White.

Further reading

• Bourne, Charles P. & Trudi B.Hahn. A history of online information services, 1963-1976. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Bradshaw, P. D. "The Walnut system: A large capacity document storage and retrieval system." American documentation 13, no. 3 (1962): 270-75.
• Burke, Colin B. America's information wars: The untold story of information systems in America's conflicts and politics from World War II to the intenet age. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.