Steve Furth

Steve Furth (1909-1991) was an American information retrieval specialist.

Life

Stephen E. Furth was born in 1909 in Vienna, Austria, where his father headed IBM's tabulating machines operations in Austria-Hungary. He served in the United States Army during World War II in a unit that pioneered the use of tabulating machines for military purposes.

Furth worked for many years at IBM. He died in May, 1991 at Manhasset, New York.

Contributions

Furth collaborated with Hans Peter Luhn at IBM on information retrieval issues. He was involved in the development of IBM's AQUARIUS (A QUery And Retrieval Interactive User System) developed to provide documentary support for lawyers defending IBM from a major antitrust law suit and needing access to very large amounts of text. It was subsequently renamed STAIRS (STorage And Information Retrieval System) and the subject of noteworthy evaluation by David Blair and Melvin Earl (Bill) Maron.

Publications

• "Automated retrieval of legal information: State of the art." Computers and automation 17, no 12 (Dec 1968): 25-38.
• STAIRS -- A user-oriented full text retrieval system. Law and computer technology 5, no 5 (Sept-Oct 1972): 114-119. Repr from Computer weekly (June 8, 1972).
• "STAIRS: An interactive full-text retrieval system" In: Automated law research; a collection of presentations delivered at the First National Conference on Automated Law Research. Ed by R. A. May. American Bar Association, 1973, pp 19-34.

Further reading

• Jackson, E. B. "In Memoriam: Stephen E. Furth, 1909-1991." Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 42, no 10 ((1991): 702.
• Bourne, Charles P. & Trudi B.Hahn. A history of online information services, 1963-1976. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.