On Thu, 29 Mar 2018, Kevin Parker via cctech wrote:
I previously worked for an insurance company and a very old issue reared
its ugly head. Trouble was all the claim and policy info was on
literally a truckload of microfiche and to find anything took three days
(seriously) so ICT had them all scanned to PDF and OCR'd - it worked a
treat but of course an expensive option depending on volume of course.
If only that were 16mm or 35mm continuous rolls, instead of microfiche!
In 1931, Emanuel Goldberg, then a chief engineer at Zeiss built
the "Statistical Machine". By recording bits optically in the margins of
microfilm, and reading them with photocells, it could find appropriate
frames!
For use in soundtrack for films, Mauer puts up to 8 parallel
variable area optical tracks in the margin!
8 bit parallel!
Goldberg was also apparently responsible for the Contax camera.
BUT, in the days leading up to World War Two, he fled Dresden and Zeiss
could not afford to have mention of a Jew in a high profile position, and
by the time the war ended, they had systematically erased most clues that
he had existed!
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/goldberg.html
A decade later, Vannevar Bush stole the idea, and without credit, claimed
it as his own, as the foundation for his Memex device.
Bush did not successfully build his machine.
Bush's Atlantic Monthly article, "As We May Think" is sometimes considered
the foundation of modern information science.
Bush did not understand nor accept the concepts of index nor hierarchical
organization, so he pushed for linkage to go from one topic into another.
Ted Nelson credits it as the inspiration for Hypertext, and Cern credits
Ted nelson.
Alas, the volume of data involved precludes reels of microfilm, and the
only hope for access is manually cataloging titles of the cards, followed
eventually by linking to images on the web, and eventual OCR of the text
portions.
How many page images will fit on a 3TB drive?
How many can we store and retrieve in the MTBF?
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
