This thread has not disappointed. Lots of good history. Re Autocoder: My dad was hired by OGA (Other Government Agency, aka CIA) in the 50s, as he was working on his PhD in Slavic linguistics, to work on their machine translation project. He would describe to a programmer what he wanted a program to do; the programmer would write it out on Autocoder sheets; a keypunch operator would input it; and a day or two later, he'd find out what it did. He figured out that if he learned to program, he could shorten that cycle time, so he did. Which led to another machine translation project at IBM Yorktown. Neither was successful.
He subsequently wound up in academia but continued to freelance for the government doing translations, typically of obscure Slavic languages for which they didn't have any resident experts. This led to a fun incident in high school where my sister's class was asked to see if they had a dictionary in the house; she reported that she'd found 42. And was accused of lying. Which got the teacher a visit from my dad, who was cheerful but direct about it, and who noted that this list included the Polish-Russian Technical Dictionary, which included not a word of English... I wish he'd lived long enough to see Google Translate, which, while not perfect, is pretty impressive--and which, when backed by someone fluent, is surely able to improve translation times of critical documents by an order of magnitude or two. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
