Kodak

Eastman Kodak is US company founded in 1881 that popularized photography and dominated the photographic film market.

The Eastman Kodak Company ("Kodak") was founded in 1881 by George Eastman and Henry Strong as the Eastman Dry Plate Company. It was renamed Eastman Kodak in 1892. Their inexpensive cameras popularized photography, but Kodak concentrated on the supply of film and film processing and expanded internationally. In 1912, Kodak established the Kodak Research Laboratories with Kenneth Mees as founding director.

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

Contributions

Kodak supplies constituted an important part of the infrastructure for administrative, commercial and social activities in all fields.

For documentation the use of "wet" photographic images was of the greatest importance document copying until the rise of xerography and digital imaging. In particular sensitized paper was needed in the early twentieth century for rapid and widespread adoption of photostat document copying, and, especially from the mid-1930s to the 1960s for microfilming.

Minicard

The early microfilm rapid selectors of Emanuel Goldberg and Vannevar Bush used photoelectric sensing to search for microfilmed images on long rolls of microfilm. This required serial search of one or more rolls and then rewinding the rolls. This did not scale well. So attempts were made to approximate random search directly to any given document by using short strips ("chips") of microfilm in a a two-step process. First, an index would point to a particular chip on a rod, in a bin, or on the periphery of a wheel; then the right location on the chip would be found in order to display the desired document. However, scaling this design for very large collections as needed by intelligence agencies was difficult and very expensive because it required great precision at very high speed. IBM developed such a system, named Walnut. Kodak and ITEK developed the Minicard system.

John W. Kuipers was director of the Minicard project. Six machines were said to have been delivered, all to US Federal government agencies. Their cost was very high. Improvements in digital computing and digital storage led to their replacement.

Further reading

On Kodak:

• Collins, Douglas. The story of Kodak. New York : H.N. Abrams, 1990. Coffee table book.
• "IBM". Wikipedia [1]

On Minicard:

• Tyler, Arthur W., W. L. Myers & J. W. Kuipers. "The application of the Kodak Minicard system." American Documentation 6 (1955): 18-30.
• Kuipers, J. W. "Minicard system for documentary information." American Documentation 8 (1957): 246-268.
• 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.