On 07/16/2015 01:12 AM, Dave G4UGM wrote:
Apparently the School of Medicine, Manchester University, England
were given a 7090 which they later connected to a PDP-8. A bit of
googling turned this up :-
http://www.ukuug.org/newsletter/linux-newsletter/linux@uk12/dclark.shtml
Nice article. Many folks fail to appreciate the link between medicine
and the history of computing. In particular, my first encounter with
database technology came from a study of MEDLARS, the system still in
existence today at the NIH. What I found particularly fascinating was
the ability to automatically organize text documents and then subject
them to English-language querying and getting results. (All done on
tape, naturally)
I'm reminded of this when I look over at my bookshelf and see Gerry
Salton's magnum opus "Automatic Information Organization and Retrieval"
sitting on a shelf. MEDLARS figures prominently in this book. Back
then, it was pretty hot stuff.
Of course, now we have Google...
--Chuck
