On Fri, 10 May 2019, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: With no first-hand knowledge, I would assume that NSA also used such. Half a century ago, when I worked at The National Space Science Data Center (NASA, Greenbelt) we dealt with a lot of data. But that is like a floppy compared to NSA, especially the Utah Data Center!

On Fri, 10 May 2019, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: 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.