The Machine that Indexed the Bible (1955)

https://books.google.com/books?id=8CkDAAAAMBAJ&pg=RA1-PA173&lpg=RA1-PA173&dq=%22Machine+that+indexed+the+bible%22&source=bl&ots=pIfUbLwwQj&sig=YTAEYqe9iqzK5Pm5Fi8uIfOjq-Q&hl=sv&sa=X&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAGoVChMI74uroM6iyAIVCo1yCh3RKQOf#v=onepage&q&f=false

by mthoms • 11 years ago

29 13 11 years ago

books.google.com

dalke5• 11 years ago

I think this is cribbed from a Popular Science article from November 1956, available at: https://books.google.com/books?id=8CkDAAAAMBAJ&pg=RA1-PA173&... . More strongly, I suspect plagiarism.

The presentation is in almost identical order as the PopSci article, and all of the facts in this mashable.com essay are a subset of those in PopSci, including the quote from "Dr. Grace Murray Hopper". A modern author who knew the topic is more likely, I think, to use "Rear Admiral Grace M. Hopper". The PopSci article also covers many other details - you should read it if this article interests you.

That quote, by the way, comes from page 1 of her 1955 book "Automatic Coding for Digital Computers", available at http://www.textfiles.com/bitsavers/pdf/univac/HopperAutoCodi... . A search for that quote using DuckDuckGo and Google finds matches only from the book, the PopSci article, and this new essay. This is consistent with my belief that PopSci is the primary and sole information source for this new piece.

FWIW, I learned about the PopSci article because of a reference in the seminal book 'Punched Cards'. One of the chapters describes textual analysis, and cites several articles about the Univac work, at http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3958636;view=1up;... .

dang• 11 years ago

Wow, what a find. Thanks! Also, ugh.

We've changed the URL from http://mashable.com/2015/09/27/univac-bible/, which I think dalke has shown has plagiarized this excellent 1955 article. It's pretty sickening to think of what else these websites must be ripping off without attribution.

I've marked this subthread off-topic because hopefully the thread can be about the extraordinary details of the original article. But props to dalke for an extraordinary bit of research.

hellyeasa• 11 years ago

Might be plagiarized, but the pictures from the mashable article add to the story. People should still check it out after reading the original but they should really source this issue :/

Particularly the last photo, a man drawing out computer workflow with a bible open in front of him. Quite a juxtaposition to think about!

"The lord is my shepherd,

I shall not want;

he makes me lie down in green pastures.

He leads me...."

dalke5• 11 years ago

What gets me is there's no need to not attribute the Popular Science article. I think it's perfectly reasonable to present treasures from the past. If this has ended with "this is a condensed version" or "this is a summary", then no one would have thought the worse. And the addition of the images (which do have proper citations), does add more to the original Pop Sci article.

pvg3• 11 years ago

That's wonderful stuff. How did you end up reading Punched Cards and what makes it 'seminal'?

dalke5• 11 years ago

I am researching the history of my field, cheminformatics. It grew out of documentation management, more specifically, chemical documentation. While that topic goes back to the 1800s, I limit my research to mechanical methods for chemical documentation search and management.

This started with punched cards in the 1940s. James Perry, then at MIT, was a nexus in the field. It's difficult to find people of the era that he wasn't connected to.

One of these is Calvin Mooers, who is a special focus of mine. Mooers developed some of the fundamental concepts that formed the basis for the computerization of chemical information. (To be more precise, he came up with ideas of how to solve problems. These ideas weren't solutions, but were in the ballpark, and ended up influencing the people who actually solved and implemented the problems.) Mooers was a Master's student at MIT, where he met Perry, and was influenced by the sorts of problems that Perry was interested in.

Mooers' Master's thesis was on a method for superimposed coding which he termed Zatocoding. A superimposed code is one where the keys are assigned to 1 or more bits, and where the bits for different keys may overlap. A Bloom filter is a type of superimpose code. In Zatocoding, there is one pass over the keys to get population statistics, then a bit of information theory to determine the number of bits to use for each key and its bit assignments. A common key ends up with 1 bit, while a rare key might have 7 bits.

Mooers is one of the contributors to "Punched Cards". I likely read the book while trying to track down his publications. I may have read it because Perry was the editor. Or I might have read it because I was trying to understand more about edge-notched punched cards.

As for 'seminal', I based that on the number of sources I've read which cite it. For something more outwardly visible, there are 100 citations at https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=464718015108686727&... . And of course the book went through two editions.

Interesting. One of those references is to "Automated concordances and word indexes: The fifties". That article says 'Father Busa inaugurated the history of the automatic production of concordances and word indexes' and 'In 1951, using the punched-card equipment available to him, Father Busa produced and published the first automated word index and concordance to four hymns written by Aquinas for the Feast of Corpus Christi, ...'

It's the same Busa who had the chapter in "Punched Cards" about working with the Dead Sea Scrolls; the one that got me to track down the Popular Science sciation. While that chapter doesn't establish the seminal nature, it does give an idea that the book was presenting cutting edge work with punched cards.

Shivetya• 11 years ago

I think the best part of the article for me was the times given, how long to prepare the data, process it, and such. The manual labor hours are simply astounding let alone the computing hours once the data was ready

dctoedt• 11 years ago

If you keep scrolling down, you'll see some interesting simple mechanical hacks in "Hints from the Model Garage" on page "Sidan 181" (that page number is at the top right corner of the browser window).

My favorite hack there is a sartorial one: "Your best hat won't get sat on [in the car] if you stow it out of the way in a holder." The text and a diagram show how to make a hat holder with a coat hanger and metal screws. This of course was in the days when men and women wore hats. (I've read that John F. Kennedy single-handedly killed the hat industry: He didn't like to wear them, and when he became president he set a new fashion trend.)

The Machine that Indexed the Bible (1955)

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