Book Id: 44858 Report for the Microfilm Rapid Selector. Contract Cac-47-24. Engineering Research Associates.
Report for the Microfilm Rapid Selector. Contract Cac-47-24
Report for the Microfilm Rapid Selector. Contract Cac-47-24

Report for the Microfilm Rapid Selector. Contract Cac-47-24

Publisher Information: 20 June 1949.

Engineering Research Associates. Report for the microfilm Rapid Selector. v, 30ff., including 10 full-page photographic illustrations, printed from negatives on Kodak Velox paper. St. Paul, MN: Engineering Research Associates, 20 June 1949. 280 x 215 mm. Original printed wrappers with metal fastener, small stain on front wrapper, slight wear; boxed. Very good.

First Edition, and Rare on the Market; this is the only copy we have ever seen for sale in our over 50 years in the trade.

In 1947, two years after Vannevar Bush published his idea for the “Memex” information retrieval system, Ralph R. Shaw, director of libraries for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, began developing a pilot model of the “Rapid Selector” machine for the electronic searching of information recorded on microfilm, working with a team of computer designers at Engineering Research Associates. This pilot model, completed in January 1949, was an attempt to realize the goals outlined in Bush’s “As we may think” (1945), which introduced some of the foundational information retrieval concepts underlying the Internet and World Wide Web. We are offering here the earliest known printed description of the finished Rapid Selector—the ERA’s June 1949 report on the completed machine—which contains detailed illustrated accounts of its design and operation. The ERA’s pilot model was the only Rapid Selector ever constructed.

The Rapid Selector project’s objective

"was to develop, within two years, a prototype machine capable of selecting microfilmed business records from microfilm rapidly: A microfilm rapid selector. Bush’s selector was indeed rapid because it took advantage of two new developments: Improved photoelectric cell technology; and the stroboscopic lamp pioneered by his colleague Harold E. Edgerton. By creating a bright flash of light lasting only one-millionth of a second, the stroboscopic lamp made it possible to copy a selected microfilm image 'on the fly,'without stopping the film (and the search) to make a copy" (M. K. Buckland, “Emanuel Goldberg, Electronic Document Retrieval, and Vannevar Bush’s Memex.” Emanuel Goldberg, 1881-1970: Pioneer of Information Science, May 1992 [web]. According to the present report, the Rapid Selector

"scans the film at the rate of more than 10,000 frames per minute which may correspond to as many as 60,000 subjects per minute. It selects all abstracts which are associated with an interest category specified by the operator, and recopies the selected items on a separate roll of 35mm film by the use of high-speed photoflash techniques." (p. ii)

After its completion the Rapid Selector was shipped to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington DC, where it remained in operation as late as 1958—a Congressional report on the “Science and Technology Act of 1958,” published in June of that year, includes a detailed note on the Rapid Selector (p. 430) which states that “the machine is now being remodeled in cooperation with the National Bureau of Standards to simplify and improve it on the basis of operating experience.” Father Roberto Busa (1913-2011), a pioneer in the use of computers for linguistic and literary analysis, observed the Rapid Selector in action in November 1949, noting that “its principal feature is the whirlwind speed with which it explores the reels of microfilm—10,000 photograms per minute—and instantaneously rephotographs on another microfilm strip all and only those photograms which bear a determined item” (Busa, Varia specimina concordantiarum [1951], p. 22). Another account of the Rapid Selector, published in Ridenour, Shaw and Hill’s Bibliography in an Age of Science (1951), mentioned that the machine stored 72,000 frames of information on a 2000-foot reel of film and could search through data at the rate of 78,000 codes per minute. Not in Origins of Cyberspace.

Book Id: 44858

Price: $7,500.00