System Development Corporation

The System Development Corporation was a US information technology firm, 1957-1987.

History

The System Development Corporation (SDC) grew out of the Rand Corporation's System Research Laboratory (a US Air Force think-tank) and a MIT Lincoln Labs project - SAGE(Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), an air defense system. SAGE was the "first computer-based, real-time, online, manmachine system" and "it revolutionized the information industry by spanning the prehistoric computer era of serial batch processing and the modern world of interactive systems." (Baum, 1981, p. 20).

The convergence of the two projects came when the Rand Corporation agreed to provide the software programming for SAGE in 1955. Starting with only five Rand programmers, the SAGE project and staff grew quickly and soon totaled more people than the RAND Corporation itself. The project became the independent System Development Division. It's role, size and future prospects as a systems designer conflicted with Rand's charter as a researcher for the USAF, so in 1956 a new, non-profit corporation was formed: the System Development Corporation (SDC).

A long and complex series of negotiations resulted in two changes in July, 1969. The not-for-profit corporation would retain its tax-exempt status but take a new name: The System Development Foundation (SDF). It would own (and then sell) the shares of a new for-profit corporation that adopted the old name, System Development Corporation (sometimes referred to as "new SDC" or "SDC #2"). The old non-profit corporation, now named the System Development Foundation, gave grants to support research and closed in 1988. The new for-profit corporation took over the name and the research and development work of the old System Development Corporation. In December 1980, a controlling interest in it was sold to the Burroughs Corporation and became an division of the Burroughs Corporation in 1981. In 1987, an enlarged Burroughs Corporation was renamed UNISYS Corporation and SDC was folded in to UNISYS.

Contributions

A rich range of research was conducted.

• ORBIT was SDC's principal information service. See below.
• Natural language processing by Robert F. Simmons.
• Study for COSATI of national document-handling systems for science and technology by Launor F Carter.
• Study for COSATI of a national abstracting and indexing system.
• Robert V. Katter worked on document representations.
• Lauren B. Doyle and Donald Blankenship worked on document classification techniques.
• Carlos Cuadra and Robert V. Katter researched relevance assessment.
• Library technology was reviewed for the National Library Commission.
• Robert V. Katter and Richard Harris conducted research on the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology.
• Carlos Cuadra and Karl M. Pearson reviewed automation in the US Federal library community.
• Judith Wanger studied the impact of online searching.

ORBIT

Originally conceived for rapid online screening of foreign literature, the marriage of timesharing and a user orientation enabled powerful bibliographical services used by the National Library of Medicine and developed into the SDC Search Service in 1973. SDC's COLEX was the first operational national online search service. During 1967-68 a general purpose version was developed known as ORBIT I (On-line Retrieval of Bibliographic Text), replaced in 1971 by ORBIT II, which was adapted for the National Library of Medicine's MEDLARS records and named ELHILL. SDC's Search Service became a large international operation providing access to many files. Carlos Cuadra was the first manager of SDC Search Service. The Information Industry Association conferred its 1975 Product of the Year award on the SDC Search Service.

Further reading

• Baum, Claude. The System Builders: The story of SDC. Santa Monica, CA: System Development Corp., 1981. ISBN 13: 9780916368029. A very detailed history of SDC and its contributions from its inception until the Burroughs merger, but it says little about the projects noted above. For ORBIT: PP 127, 151, 182-184 & 234.
• Bourne, Charles P. & Trudi B.Hahn. A history of online information services, 1963-1976. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Esp. chap 6: "SDC ORBIT and related systems," pp 185-227.
• See the Stanford University Libraries finding aid for detailed account of organizational changes [1]

Papers

• University of Minnesota. Libraries. Charles Babbage Institute. Burroughs Corporation records. System Development Corporation records. Collection CBI 90, Series 98. 1946-1982. 23 cu. ft. Finding aid [2]
• Stanford University, Department of Special Collections. System Development Foundation (Palo Alto, Calif.) Records, 1957-1993. Collection M05041957-1993. 170 linear feet. Finding aid [3]