Calvin Northrup Mooers: Difference between revisions

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Calvin Mooers (1919-1994) was an American information retrieval specialist.

Life

Calvin Northrup Mooers was born on October 24, 1919. He graduated BA summa cum laude at the University of Minnesota in 1941 and joined the Naval Ordnance Laboratory as a physicist. At the end of the war he became part of the Lab's newly created Computer Division under John Vincent Atanasoff. Mooers left in 1946 for MIT where he met James Perry and became interested in information retrieval. In 1947 Mooers founded a company, “Zator,” and began marketing a custom-designed mechanical retrieval systems using edge-notched cards. He completed a Master's thesis on Application of random codes to gathering of statistical information. Mooers founded the Rockford Research Institute, a nonprofit corporation, in the early 1960s to facilitate his and Raymond J. Solomonoff’s grant-funded research. He died on December 1, 1994.

Contributions

TRAC programming language. In 1959, Mooers began to develop the Text Reckoning and Compiling (TRAC) language.
Mooers coined the terms "information retrieval" in 1950 and "descriptors."
He promulgated "Mooers' Law" on the use of information: That an information will not be used if using it is more work than not using it.

Zatocoding

Although Mooers was involved in the early design of digital computers, he made his name through his development of Zatocoding for edge-notched cards. Before the 1980s individuals made heavy use of cards which had a row of small round holes along the edges of a card. Cutting away card between the hole and the edge left a notch instead of a hole. In a simple case each card might represent a book and each hole represented a possible feature (attribute), such as a topic of the book. Notching the hole for "history" would mean that it was a history book. Notching a hole representing "France" would encode a book about France. Notching both the "history" and the "France" holes would mean a book on the history of France. Cards with desired notches were immediately identifiable by inserting needle through the holes (codes) of interest and lifting. Unnotched cards would be lifted; notched cards would remain unlifted. In a simple system in which each hole had a single meaning, the number of usable codes (attributes) was limited because the number of codes could not exceed the number of holes. Mooers explored the potential of using combinations of two or more holes to represent a single code. This meant, in theory, that there could be as many different codes as there were unique combinations of holes. A single code might be part of multiple combinations but each combination of holes should represent only a single code. In the mechanical system that the Zator company marketed each card had just 40 holes along the bottom edge. By using combinations of holes up to 10,000 different codes could be uniquely encoded -- and any cards wrongly retrieved ("false drops") should be obvious errors. Mooers explored the effects of assigning combinations of holes to codes at random. This technique can also be applied to encoding the positions on punch cards and is also known as superimposed coding. It is a form of what in computing is called a hash code. (See Further reading below).

Publications

"Atanasoff at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory." Annals of the History of Computing 15:2 (1993), 54-55.
"TRAC, a Procedure-Describing Language for the Reactive Typewriter." CACM, 9:3 (March 1966), 215-219.
Putting Probability to Work in Coding Punched Cards: Zatocoding. (Zator Technical Bulletin No. 10), 1947. Reprinted as Zator Technical Bulletin No. 30 (1950).
The Zator - A Proposal: A Machine for Complete Documentation, 1947. Reprinted with preface as Zator Technical Bulletin No. 65 (1951).
"Zatocoding applied to mechanical organization of knowledge." American documentation 2, issue 1 (Jan 1951): 20-32.
"'Mooers' Law or Why some retrieval systems are used and others are not." Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science 22, no 1 (Nov 1996): 22-23.[1]
Calvin N. and Charlotte D. Mooers oral history interview, 22 June 1993, OH 254,

Awards

American Society for Information Science. Award of Merit, 1978.

Papers

University of Minnesota, Babbage Institute, Minneapolis, MN. Calvin N. Mooers papers CBI 81 55455. ca. 1930-1994. Finding aid [4]

@@ Line 3: / Line 3: @@
 == Life ==
-Calvin Northrup Mooers was born on October 24, 1919. He graduated BA summa cum laude at the University of Minnesota in 1941 and joined the Naval Ordnance Laboratory as a physicist. At the end of the war he became part of the Lab's newly created Computer Division under John Vincent Atanasoff. Mooers left in 1946 for MIT where he met [[James Whitney Perry|James Perry]]. In 1947 Mooers founded a company, “Zator,” and began marketing a custom designed version of edge-notched cards He completed a Master's thesis on ''Application of random codes to gathering of statistical information'' in 1948.
+Calvin Northrup Mooers was born on October 24, 1919. He graduated BA summa cum laude at the University of Minnesota in 1941 and joined the Naval Ordnance Laboratory as a physicist. At the end of the war he became part of the Lab's newly created Computer Division under John Vincent Atanasoff. Mooers left in 1946 for MIT where he met [[James Whitney Perry|James Perry]] and became interested in information retrieval. In 1947 Mooers founded a company, “Zator,” and began marketing a custom-designed mechanical retrieval systems using edge-notched cards. He completed a Master's thesis on ''Application of random codes to gathering of statistical information''. Mooers founded the Rockford Research Institute, a nonprofit corporation, in the early 1960s to facilitate his and Raymond J. Solomonoff’s grant-funded research. He died on December 1, 1994.
-Raymond J. Solomonoff joined Zator Company in 1957. Mooers founded the Rockford Research Institute, a nonprofit corporation. in the early 1960s to facilitate his and Solornonoff’s grant-funded research. He died December 1, 1994.
 == Contributions ==
-*Zator coding: Zator coding used specially notched cards for selection based on fuzzy sets. Each notch was a descriptor representing information in the document to which that card referred.
 *TRAC programming language. In 1959, Mooers began to develop the Text Reckoning and Compiling (TRAC) language.
-*Mooers coined the terms "information retrieval" (1950) and "descriptors."
+*Mooers coined the terms "information retrieval" in 1950 and "descriptors."
-*He promulgated "Mooers' Law" on the use of information.
+*He promulgated "Mooers' Law" on the use of information: That an information will not be used if using it is more work than not using it.
-*He advocated assigning random superimposed codes to reduce the possibility of false drops and assure greater accuracy.
-June, 2001 issues of IEEE Annals of History.
-Mooers developed his own coding and indexing ideas. He was a pioneer of IR systems, establishing a new approach to intellectual organization of knowledge. By 1947, Mooers was an "influential figure in the early information science community" (Burke). His Zatocoding system used superimposed random codes to improve information retrieval from a file of edge-notched cards. He began his own information management company.  He also developed a programming language, TRAC, which is still in use today
-"In the 1940's Taube, Mooers, and Perry were the leaders among Americans...investigating subject analysis, the coding of subject terms, and their relationship to information retrieval. Their approach combined a pragmatic view and abstract thinking" (Farkas-Conn). He was editor ADI? (Bellardo).
+=== Zatocoding ===
+Although Mooers was involved in the early design of digital computers, he made his name through his development of Zatocoding for edge-notched cards. Before the 1980s individuals made heavy use of cards which had a row of small round holes along the edges of a card. Cutting away card between the hole and the edge left a notch instead of a hole. In a simple case each card might represent a book and each hole represented a possible feature (attribute), such as a topic of the book. Notching the hole for "history" would mean that it was a history book. Notching a hole representing "France" would encode a book about France. Notching both the "history" and the "France" holes would mean a book on the history of France. Cards with desired notches were immediately identifiable by inserting needle through the holes (codes) of interest and lifting. Unnotched cards would be lifted; notched cards would remain unlifted.
+In a simple system in which each hole had a single meaning, the number of usable codes (attributes) was limited because the number of codes could not exceed the number of holes. Mooers explored the potential of using combinations of two or more holes to represent a single code. This meant, in theory, that there could be as many different codes as there were unique combinations of holes. A single code might be part of multiple combinations but each combination of holes should represent only a single code. In the mechanical system that the Zator company marketed each card had just 40 holes along the bottom edge. By using combinations of holes up to 10,000 different codes could be uniquely encoded -- and any cards wrongly retrieved ("false drops") should be obvious errors.
+Mooers explored the effects of assigning combinations of holes to codes at random. This technique can also be applied to encoding the positions on punch cards and is also known as superimposed coding. It is a form of what in computing is called a hash code. (See Further reading below).
 == Publications ==
@@ Line 35: / Line 30: @@
 *Babbage Institute Finding list [https://archives.lib.umn.edu/repositories/3/resources/105]
 *Weiss, E. "Obituary for Calvin Mooers." ''IEEE Annals of the History of Computing'' 46, issue 3 (Fall-1995): 79-81.
-*Ceruzzi, Paul E. & Haigh, Thomas. "Calvin Mooers, Zatocoding, and Early Research on Information Retrieval." In: ''Exploring the Early Digital'', ed. T. Haigh. Cham : Springer International Publishing, 2019, pp.69-86.
+Zatocoding:
+*"Superimposed code." ''Wikipedia'' [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superimposed_code]
+*Ceruzzi, Paul E. "Calvin Mooers, Zatocoding, and Early Research on Information Retrieval." In: ''Exploring the Early Digital'', ed. T. Haigh. Cham : Springer International Publishing, 2019, pp.69-86.
 For additional biographical information see the Babbage Institute Web site noted below and the Web site developed by Mooers' daughters, Helen and Edith: <nowiki>http://www.tracfoundation.org/mooers/mooers.htm</nowiki>.