JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

The oblong pamphlet IBM Information Retrieval was published around 1959/1961 (this is an early evergreen pub with no date but the bibliography cites only 1957 and 1958 “recent” works)  and is a visual/expressive/schematic summation of the current state of affairs in info storage and retrieval delivered in a step-by-step presentation, concentrating on library applications. The main IBM machine at use here is the RAMAC (unnumbered) which made its first appearance in sales in 1956. This is a far more realistic (and existent!) peek at the possibilities of the control of information than the Bush MEMEX (1945, etc.), though of course it wasn’t nearly as far-reaching as Bush envisioned, and didn’t actually deliver the text to the end user, though it did deliver a great deal else, maintaining massive amounts of data in a usable format. It is a fairly scarce document, so I reproduced the small section on “the library of the future” which we are well passed, probably by 1975. 

• This is another example of something I’m just in the early stages of attention–when the time of effectiveness of what was reckoned to be part of the future and a great innovation turns out to have a very short lifespan and becomes outdated relatively quickly.