11 May
2019
11 May
'19
6:12 p.m.
On Fri, 10 May 2019, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
Reading about WALNUT, it was more than a little
unusual for its time.
The idea was the setup stored (photographically) almost a million images
using a non-silver process. The images were indexed digitally and the
index was searchable. The output appears to be a standard aperture
card. Although both of the references that I found mention
Kalfax/Kalvar media, WikiP says that the systems delivered to the CIA
used a different diazo process that was apparently more stable than the
Kalvar process.
There have been quite a few systems for computerized retrieval of
photographic images.
Besides "aperture cards" there were a number of earlier systems that
encoded an ID on the microfilm.
Lest we be overly concerned with that using too much of the microfilm
physical space, keep in mind that soundtrack was often included on
16mm and 35mm movies. Maurer, and others?, had up to EIGHT parallel
analog audio tracks in the margin of movie film. Eight bit parallel!?!
90 years ago, Emmanuel Goldberg built a system:
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/statistical.html
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/goldberg.html
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/goldbush.html
One of several reasons why Goldberg is largely unknown is that he was
working in Germany (Zeiss) when the Nazis came into power, and Zeiss
had to systematically wipe the records of existence of Jewish engineers.
His optical reading of the metadata was done by "complement" or
"extinction".
Vannevar Bush's speculative article "As We may Think" (Atlantic Monthly
1945, although first written in 1939) suggested possibilities for the
"Memex".
It used "coindcident" templates, instead of "extinction" for the
matching.
It also talked about the microfilm remaining in motion, with a Xenon
flash tube to "stop" the motion. The level of magnification and the
speed that he talked about moving the film were not consistent with the
speed of the flash tubes that were actually AVAILABLE at the time, nor in
the 1950s.
Vannevar Bush did not reference the work of predecessors, such as Goldberg
and a few others, although there is some evidence that he had at least
heard about Goldberg's work. Atlantic Montlhly was popular press, not a
"peer-reviewed" academic journal, so policies of citations were lax.
Bush seems to have not been a believer in hierarchical information
storage, and used examples of flipping from documents to other documents
in "trails".
Ted Nelson credits that with inspiration for "hypertext".
Berners-Lee credits Ted Nelson's hypertext with inspiration for WWW.
"As We May Think" has caused Bush to often be considered the "father of
Information Science", which frankly, I don't feel is much more accurate
than some of the modern crediting of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates with
"inventing" the computer.