The Genesis of NASA RECON

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The Genesis of NASA RECON

• William MitchellProfessor of Information Science
• University of Arkansas at Little Rock

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This is the story of a new computer company in
the middle 1960s that had innovative ideas and
proven leadership, but missed a golden
opportunity.
This is the story of a half-dozen men who played
a pivotal role in the development of scientific
information systems, simply by bringing them into
existence when the experts doubted their
feasibility.
This is also the story about an untold story that
has been consistently misreported in the
literature, illustrating again that the winners
write history.
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The Bunker-Ramo Corporation

• The Martin-Marietta Electronics Division in
  Maryland was merged early in 1964 with TRW's
  Computer Division in Canoga Park. Together they
  formed a private company, The Bunker-Ramo
  Corporation, 90 owned by Martin-Marietta.
• In 1964 John Parker was president of Teleregister
  Corporation, a publicly traded corporation
  headquartered in Stamford, CN that offered
  on-line technology to the airline and brokerage
  industries. Parker was also a member of the Board
  of Directors of Martin-Marietta where George
  Bunker was the president. Bunkers career was in
  aerospace and he was a good friend of Simon Ramo
  who had proposed creating Bunker-Ramo. Parker
  convinced them that the smaller Teleregister
  Corporation should be merged into Bunker-Ramo.
• Herbert Mitchell had joined Teleregister at
  Parkers invitation in August of 1962 as VP for
  Advanced Research. Parker, Luther Harr,
  Teleregisters VP for Marketing, and Mitchell had
  worked together at Univac. Mitchell worked on
  Teleregisters airline seat reservation systems
  products and designed a high-speed switching
  computer that was proposed to the National
  Security Agency in 1963.

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Dr. Simon Ramo deserves recognition as a
statesman and executor of US high technology. He
co-founded two Fortune 500 companies. One of
these was TRW initially Ramo-Wooldridge in
1953, an enormously successful defense
electronics firm that put together the complex
systems required for the first American
intercontinental ballistic missile. The other
company was Bunker-Ramo, a computer venture
founded in 1964 Allied Corporation, now Allied
Signal, acquired it in 1981.
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• Herbert F. Mitchell, Jr.
• Ph.D. Applied Mathematics, Harvard, 1948 (helped
  Howard Aiken build the Mark II)
• Joined Eckert-Mauchly on November, 1949 and
  continued with Univac and Sperry Rand until 1959
  (chief programmer on the UNIVAC I, later sales
  manager)
• 59-61 Honeywell.
• 61-62 Collins Radio
• 62-66 Teleregister/Bunker-Ramo
• 67 TRW
• 67-71 NASA Goddard Space Center.

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Three Independent Divisions

• Parker became Chairman of the Board of a new,
  public Bunker-Ramo on July 6, 1964 and Simon Ramo
  assumed the Presidency. Milton Mohr headed the
  computer group in Canoga Park that was
  experienced in government contracting.

• For two years Mitchell had been commuting
  bi-weekly from Los Angeles to Stamford and now
  asked to join the Canoga Park group. He was made
  staff VP charged with commercializing that
  divisions expertise. The new company was
  scrambling for business as the Teleregister was
  the only profitable division and it was loosing
  its airline reservations business to IBM while
  continuing to maintain its position in the
  brokerage quotation business. Simon Ramo was
  interested in on-line information retrieval and
  that fall he suggested to Mitchell to explore how
  the Teleregister divisions expertise in on-line
  desktop communications could be brought to bear
  on this problem.

• I conceived the idea of combining several
  computer-based information systems into a
  single service, and set up a project to develop
  the idea.Mitchell autobiography

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The NASA Proposal

• The Unsolicited Proposal for the Direct
  Electronic Library, describing centralized
  Electronic Reference Centers distributing
  citation data to distributed users via telephone
  lines was delivered to NASA at the end of 1964.
  NASA subsequently issued a public solicitation to
  implement a prototype system.
• Meanwhile, NASA advertised for bidders to
  provide a pilot system of remote information
  retrieval for their many centers across the
  nation. This seemed to me to be an ideal way of
  getting started in the broad field I had been
  proposing, and persuaded our management to bid on
  the contract. I also persuaded management to do
  the programming without charge so we could have
  proprietary rights to it when the contract was
  completed. Mitchell autobiography
• On April 12, 1965 Mitchell distributed 6 copies
  of a detailed functional specification of the
  operation of the Direct Electronic Library (Simon
  Ramo also received a copy).

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Melvin S. Day joined NASA in 1960 as  Deputy
Director, Office of Technical Information and
Education, and became Director, Technical
Information Division in 1962.  He reorganized and
expanded the information services that NASA had
taken control of from the National Advisory
Committee for Aeronautics. He also contracted
Documentation Inc. to develop a
science-technology information processing center
and contracted American Institute of Aeronautics
and Astronautics to provide information about
published, nonfederal literature in the space
sciences. --www.libsci.sc.edu/bob/ISP/
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NASAs Vision for Bibliographic Retrieval

• Van A. Wente directed systems development for
  Day and plotted the strategy for introducing
  on-line retrieval (called the Retrieval Dialog
  Study--Simpson Flanagan, 1966). Under Wente
  NASA had already placed in many field center
  libraries duplicate copies of the documents
  indexed at headquarters. The documents, in
  nearly every case, could be viewed immediately
  either as journal articles, books, proceedings,
  full-size reports, or microficheback to 1962
  (Wente, 1971). These duplicate libraries were
  under-utilized because of the effort involved in
  manual searching the paper indices, so the
  missing piece was on-line citation searching,
  which NASA had already decided to call RECON,
  short for REmote CONsole (Bourne Bellardo,
  in-press). Dissemination of access to NASAs
  citation collection, precisely as Mitchells
  proposal described, would permit in most cases
  not simply the identification of a document that
  could be delivered in several days, but the
  alerting of a local librarian who could supply
  the document within the hour! Indeed, any
  failure to have full document text available
  would clearly break the full chain of feedback
  and iteration which on-line systems usually
  employ (Wente, 1971).

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A batch searching service was offered by NASA on
an IBM 1401, and W. T. Brandhorst of
Documentation Inc. reported in 1966 that DI has
prepared, edited, and delivered over 1000
searches in 1965, all of which, if not
exclusively machine searches, received their
major contributions from a machine search.
Imagine Days excitement in 1964 at Bunker-Ramos
suggestion that over 50,000 searches per month
could be conducted from any NASA facility in the
country at a cost of 1 each! NASA knew that
there were still other organizations with
interest and technology appropriate to mounting a
bibliographic retrieval system of this scale so
Wente developed specifications that in April
1965 resulted in NASAs issuance of a request for
proposals to develop a prototype system employing
the full NASA collection, then about 200,000
documents, in a realistic environment of research
libraries with direct use of the system by
working NASA scientists and engineers. By a
formal competitive process, NASA selected the
Bunker-Ramo Corporation to conduct the test
principally at three NASA locations using remote
terminals and programs owned by that company and
operated through a UNIVAC 1050 computer located
in New York City (Wente, 1971).
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In 1964 an event occurred that would alter
computing and information retrieval forever a
third-generation computer was introduced by IBM,
the IBM 360 series. Third-generation computers
were the first computers that combined mass
random access disks, CRT terminals, and
telecommunications and as such, ushered in
interactive computing. What this meant for
information retrieval was that massive databases
could be stored centrally and access could be
offered worldwide. The idea of services to a
global marketplace from an efficient, centralized
computer facility was unheard of at the time but
was exciting beyond belief.
http//library.dialog.com/chron/2002/0006/1020628.
html
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I arranged a meeting with Mel Day in Washington
D.C. in 1965. During the meeting, Mel responded
to my description of the utility of Dialog by
explaining that he had a dozen or so people a
week describing systems that could do most
anything short of reading your mind. He said he
had to see it in operation to believe its
effectiveness. After further discussion I offered
to submit an unsolicited proposal to install
Dialog on the NASA database and conduct an
evaluation of the approach at the Ames Research
Center in Mt. View, California. He responded by
issuing a request for proposal (RFP) in April of
1965 incorporating the features we had discussed.
We submitted a bid. Much to our chagrin and
enormous disappointment, we learned that Bunker
Ramo had also submitted a proposal and had been
awarded the prototype contract. As this contract
was to be our avenue to proof-of-concept as well
as a vehicle for becoming independent of Lockheed
independent research funding, I felt we had lost
a major opportunity, and we needed to come up
with another alternative. I decided we should
submit a very low-cost proposal, one within Mel
Day's discretionary funding limit, for a parallel
experiment, arguing that this way NASA would have
a backup in case the Bunker Ramo system didn't
work out to their satisfaction.--http//library.di
alog.com/chron/2002/0006/1020628.html
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• A summary of the interesting bidding process is
  reported as follows
• In 1964 after some discussion with Mel Day of
  NASA, Roger Summit prepared a proposal to NASA to
  use DlALOG for the automation of the NASA
  information system.
• Daniel Sullivan of Bunker Ramo also bid on the
  proposal and received the award to develop the
  prototype for the later Bunker Ramo System. The
  initial request for proposals asked for 20 ideas
  in the system specifications. At that time DlALOG
  included 19 of these ideas.
• Undaunted, Summit prepared an unsolicited
  proposal for a parallel experiment to be run
  between the NASA-Ames Research Center and the
  Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory.
• NASA specified a dial-up teletype protocol and
  purchased the Bunker Ramo equipment to support
  the project. After two years, the Bunker Ramo
  experiment proved unfruitful and NASA dropped it.
  
• ---http//library.dialog.com/chron/2002/0006/10206
  28.html

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The NASA Contract

• In 1964, after discussion with Day, Summit
  prepared an unsolicited proposal to use a
  Lockheed-developed online search system for
  automating the NASA information system. Unknown
  to Summit, Simon Ramo of Bunker-Ramo had also
  talked to Day and Wente about the same issue, and
  had also submitted an unsolicited proposal
  (Wente, 1995). NASA responded by issuing a
  Request for Proposals in April 1965 to develop a
  prototype online system that was to employ the
  full NASA collection (then about 200,000
  documents), in a realistic library environment
  with direct use by scientists and engineers
  (Hlava, 1978). Bourne, unpublished book
• Bunker-Ramo approved the submittal of the
  prototype proposal developed by Mitchell,
  including not charging for programming.
  Contract NASW 1369 was awarded to Bunker-Ramo in
  the Fall of 1965 that called for NASA to fund the
  conversion of their data and the rental of
  demonstration equipment and telecommunications
  costs for a two month trial of NASA RECON.
• We can surmise based upon published descriptions
  of other prototypes that Bunker-Ramo proposed the
  most ambitious test.

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The unsolicited proposal had described setting up
a nationwide network to connect 15 NASA
installations employing 34,236 personnel. In a
single center configuration these CRT consoles
would communicate with a single computer and its
disk file controller, which limited to 100 the
number of concurrent searches that could be
accomplished across the system. A single center
system was projected to cost 54,500 per month
and provide for 54,500 searches per month to NASA
at the targeted 1 per search, with a peak
capacity of 350,000 searches. A three-center
system was estimated to cost 108,500 per month,
hence providing 108,500 searches at 1 each, but
having a peak capacity of 1,050,000 searches per
month. If 12 centers were configured, the cost
grew to 349,000 per month with a peak capacity
of 4,200,000 searches (over 5 searches per
workday for every NASA employee).
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Mitchell described a search strategy based on
isolating a list of accession numbers by
specifying a primary attribute (author, title,
source, date, etc.) and then refining that list
by applying key words The computer at the
center will attempt to match each such key word
against a master list containing all indexed key
words for the chosen category plus all
anticipated synonyms of these. As each
successive key word is entered, the computer
responds with a rejection indication if it fails
to identify the key word, or the number of
articles which are associated with that key word
(or its synonym) and all earlier accepted key
words. Further restrictions upon selection may
be imposed by specifying inclusive dates of
publication, role status of the key word, type of
article, size of article, sophistication of
treatment, etc., as is deemed desirable. Each
specification adds to cost of indexing, of
storage, and of selection. When the number of
isolated articles has reached a sufficiently
small value, the user requests display of titles,
and then proceeds as described for a direct
reference display of the full citation and
instructions for ordering the full article
--Mitchell, 1964
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Implementation

• NASA contractors provided magnetic tapes off an
  IBM 1410 in Suitland, MD, for the two years of
  citations that had been published in bi-weekly
  printed indices. This collection was updated
  with a new tape bi-weekly for the duration of the
  project and the citation collection that was
  growing at 2000 documents a week reached 275,000
  citations by the date the trial began.
• It took several months to work out with the
  contractors the format of the tapes. Mitchell
  wrote the file inversion program that ran on a GE
  computer in Canoga Park and created files for the
  Univac 1150 that was to host the Bunker-Ramo
  consoles with all of the citation records on its
  magnetic drum. New tapes were shipped from
  California to NYC with each update from NASA.
• When the conversion program was completed and the
  backlog converted in May 1966, Mitchell drove to
  NYC with 50 reels of tape and a Users Manual
  titled NASA/RECON---COMPUTER/ LIBRARY AT YOUR
  DESK. It was then up to four programmers at work
  in Maryland to complete and test 60 program
  modules.

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Two-Month Trial

• Six NASA centers used 23 consoles via telephone
  lines to conduct on-line bibliographic searches
  for two months starting in October of 1966.
  Two reports document the trial
• NASA/RECON User's Manual A Test Operation for
  Remote Console Retrieval of Scientific and
  Technical Aerospace Information Conducted by
  Bunker-Ramo Corporation, National Aeronautics and
  Space Administration. Scientific and Technical
  Information Division. October 1966 NBS
  6624976.
• Evaluation of the User Reactions to a Prototype
  On-Line Information Retrieval System, Meister, D.
  and  Sullivan, D. J. (of the Human Factors
  group at Bunker-Ramo Corp). Published October
  1967. NASA Contractor Report Number
  NASA-CR-918
• Three major areas of user dissatisfaction
  identified in the evaluation
• User Manual ambiguity concerning deletion of
  query terms and the manner of implementation of
  the OR function
• Sluggish system response to the Transmit key.
• Dismay with the indexing system RECON users
  were brought into very close personal contact
  with the characteristics of the present indexing
  system this intimacy caused them to attribute
  some of their dissatisfaction with indexing terms
  to RECON (Meister, 1967).

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Success

• Van Wente, however, looked at the nearly 350
  successful searches per week and concluded that
  the test showed that working scientists and
  engineers both could and would use a hands-on
  retrieval terminal, and further, that they could
  obtain useful results directly with no
  inter-mediary personnel and only a minimum of
  instruction (Wente, 1971). NASA was very
  pleased.
• In addition to its significant performance in
  its primary role, RECON was successfully utilized
  to (1) update the very bibliographic collections
  upon which it is based, (2) trace the evolution
  of work in a given field, (3) provide a
  chronological record of an authors work, and (4)
  trace the history of corporate involvement in a
  given field (Meister and Sullivan, 1967).

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Productivity Unmatched for Two more Years

• Lancaster and Fayen (1973) begin their review
  of Meister and Sullivans report with Over a 7
  week experimental period a staggering 6133 uses
  were recorded at six separate NASA centers.
  Other reviewers seem not to understand that no
  other online bibliographic retrieval system
  accumulated that number of uses (or that number
  of hours) for at least two more years (for the
  first 80 hour DIALOG test at Ames Lancaster cites
  Summits report that the system was down 24 of
  the scheduled time and in all 96 searches were
  completed. In a subsequent 12 month trial at
  NASA headquarters only 13 of the 300 scheduled
  terminal hours were lost and approximately 300
  searches were conducted).

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Business and Politics

• Milt Mohr was not interested in his division
  getting into commercial ventures but had
  tolerated Ramos request to host Mitchell. He
  refused to contribute his research funds to the
  RECON project and had only allowed the GE
  computer to be used third shift to accomplish the
  file inversion.

Luther Harr had set up an east coast service
bureau for brokerage houses and wanted to commit
a significant piece of the Univac 1050 to this
operation, which was much more profitable than
the rates that NASA was paying to run the
prototype.
Before the trial began Simon Ramo stepped down
and Milt Mohr became CEO of Bunker-Ramo and Harr
continued as Executive VP. Mitchell was asked
to leave the company.
NASA had no funds to commit to ramping up the
prototype, but they asked to continue
month-to-month at the contracted rate. Mohr
doubled the cost of extending the trial on the
pretext of recouping the losses of the low bid,
but never expected that NASA would accept the new
terms. Bunker-Ramo owned the programs for the
project and the data files, but NASA had the
project documentation and experience with the
system acquired under the test contract.
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What If

• Simon Ramo had pushed Milt Mohr to put
  Bunker-Ramos resources behind the RECON project?

• The test would have been hosted on a modern
  computer and implemented in nine months instead
  of sixteen.
• The users manual would have been implemented as
  designed.

• Bunker-Ramo had pursued its relationship with
  NASA?

• Mitchell, instead of Roger Summit, would have had
  proof of concept and momentum to move to the
  delivery of other databases.

• Bunker-Ramo had the networking experience and
  marketing ability to offer on-line access to
  bibliographic data anywhere in the country,
  reliably, and inexpensively (it took Summit three
  years to learn how to scale up network access).

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Recognition of Dr. Herbert F. Mitchell Questions
Comments
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Search procedure implemented for trial
Allowed to delete only last term specified
31
BRL 1964, TELEREGISTER TELEFILE,
APPLICATIONS General purpose computing, on-line
and real-time uses such as Banking, Airline
Reservations, Communications Switching,
Passenger-Record Retrieval these on-line systems
work with nationwide communications networks
consisting of high-speed (up to 1,200 bits sec)
and low-speed (up to 200 words/min) facilities.
Switching, terminating and transceiver apparatus
for these networks are provided by the
manufacturer. RELIABILITY, OPERATING EXPERIENCE
Teleregister on-line systems have been operating
with a record of 99.8 up-time since 1952. The
systems employ duality and built-in controls to
maintain reliability, coupled with rigid
preventive maintenance. They have on-line
capability for 24hours per day, 7- day per week
service. INSTALLATIONS Processors United Air
Lines, Inc., Denver, Colo. 3 Trans World Air
Lines, New York Idlewild 2 Howard Savings
Institution, Newark, N.J. 2 Union Dime Savings
Bank, New York, N.Y. 2 Society for Savings,
Hartford, Conn. 2 Teleregister TeleCenter, 75
Varick Street, New York, N.Y. 3
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The FASTRANDtm II The FASTRAND II
random-access mass storage system was one of the
most impressive peripherals ever attached to a
commercial computer. Used with the UNIVAC 1108
computer, it provided the first permanent file
storage capability in the UNIVAC 1100 series
family. No UNIVAC programmer who ever
encountered No UNIVAC programmer who ever
encountered a FASTRAND is likely to forget it. It
was big, heavy (it weighed about two and a
quarter tons, and required special reinforcement
of the raised floor it sat on), had a large
window lit by flourescent lights which let you
see the two huge drums rotating in opposite
directions at 880 revolutions per minute and the
heads jumping back and forth as various tracks
were accessed
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1963 UNIVAC 1050 is a solid state, character
addressable computing sub-system. It has a basic
magnetic core memory of 8,192 six-bit
alphanumeric characters that can be expanded in
modules of 4,096 characters to a maximum capacity
of 32,768. The 1050 was designed to supplement
the parallel processing capabilities of the
UNIVAC III, 490 Real Time, and 1107 Thin Film
Memory computing systems.
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IBM 360 Computer
                                                  
                                                  
                           IBM System 360, Model
30, Memory size up to 64K bytes, 1965 (3 times
faster processor and memory access speed than the
1050)
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Disk vs. Drum in 1965
IBM 2314 STORAGE CAPACITY llem Per cylinder
Per disk storage Per IBM 2314module Disk
storage drives 8 Cylinders 200
1,600 Tracks 20 4,000
32,000 Bytes (alphameric characters) 145,880
29,176,000 233,408,000 Packed decimal
digits (numeric only) 291,760
58,352,000 466,816,000 Transfer
rate 312,000 bytes/sec Average Seek
Time 85 milliseconds FASTRAN II
Drum Bytes 132,120,576 6-bit
characters, Transfer rate 100 kilobytes1 per
second Average access time 92
milliseconds Read/write heads 64, on a
movable boom between the two drums