1 Anyone who
doubts the astonishing, if sometimes misguided, ingenuity of designers of IR
mechanisms is referred to the brief description by Roberts [116] (writing in
1984 on the history of the thesaurus in IR) of a system operating at RRE
Malvern in 1955. This might be described as a peek-a-boo system, except that
the "cards" were 12"x12" metal plates, swinging on a heavy metal post, and
"punched" by means of a Black & Decker drill!
2 A very much later review of machine
translation (Hutchins [98]) prompts the thought that, whatever doubts one may
have about computer-based IR, compared to MT it has been outstandingly
successful.
3 Seventeen years later, Sparck Jones
and Tait [113] experimented with a very similar procedure, without
referencing Hutchins.