| Monty Hyams (1918-2013): Patent Information Pioneer | home | intro | derwent | personal | downloads | links |
These
early days pre-dated the
online world that itself predated the Web. Searches were
carried out inhouse on punched card sorters -- each
hole in the card denoting a search parameter. These punched cards had the abstracts pasted on them, so once your search had identified an item of interest, you could soon read the text in clear print, with associated drawings and formulae.
The
initial online services of mid 1970s onwards
removed those benefits. You could not even display
simple graphics. Nor were computing capabilities a match even for the
much smaller
database sizes of that era. There were continual 'memory overflow'
problems with the early online systems.
And
when you had painfully
identified some records of interest, what then? How to view the
associated
abstracts and drawings?
Microfilm
was used for archiving Derwent's printed publications. In 1983 we went
to the trouble of having exactly
10,000 sequentially numbered abstracts per 200 feet of microfilm reel.
We even
devised an intelligent terminal which recorded hits from multiple
online
searches, sorted them into order and then automatically located each
frame in
turn. The trouble was that cartridges still had to be loaded and
unloaded.
There was no satisfactory jukebox system for the purpose.
CD-ROM,
a few years later,
improved the proposition -- but even so, each could only hold about
50,000
records with graphics. Even by then our database was more than a
hundred times
that size.
There was a lack of bandwidth and computing power that seems unbelievable unless you lived through it. In 1986, owners of PCs with the then standard 20 megabytes of disk storage could perform offline analysis of a thousand Derwent records containing 10 parameters. This was reckoned a state-of-the-art development. But those records -- pure ASCII text -- would have taken those users one hour to download! .
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