Post #4119472

Fun read today: "Evolution of the ASTIA automated search and retrieval system" from 1961 - https://archive.org/details/DTIC_AD0252000/mode/2up tl;dr In 1951, US Department of Defense had a massive library of documentation that was growing at a rate of 30,000 documents per year. The agency responsible for the library, called ASTIA, considered migrating to a mechanised or a computerised system for document search and retrieval, but time and again discovered that humans were more efficient than machines. IBM pitched their IBM 9900 Index Analyzer machine, but after a pilot, it was considered to be too expensive and slow. The ASTIA eventually decided to use a general-purpose computer by RAND for their search, and by 1961 it was running - even without random-access storage. The search was fully linear, scanning across tapes with ~470,000 entries per standard 2400 foot tape reel (all library of 175,000 articles required 4 reels at the time). It took 5 minutes to read a full tape (fast!), but the system could run multiple searches at a time.