Calvin Mooers
Calvin Northrup Mooers | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 24, 1919 Minneapolis, Minnesota |
| Died | December 1, 1994 (aged 75) |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Computer Scientist |
| Spouse | Charlotte Davis |
Calvin Northrup Mooers (October 24, 1919 – December 1, 1994), was an American
Early life
Mooers was a native of
He coined the term "information retrieval", using it first in a conference paper presented in March 1950.[1] See also a short paper published later that year from Mooers.[2]
Mooers's law
He coined "Mooers's law" (not to be confused with Moore's law) and its corollary in 1959:
- An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.
- Where an information retrieval system tends not to be used, a more capable information retrieval system may tend to be used even less.
TRAC
He founded the Rockford Research Institute in 1961, where he developed the
Awards
Mooers received the
- He was a participant in early developmental work on digital computers, a researcher, author, and implementer of applications in information retrieval; and a prophet in the 1950s describing the future importance of what is now called Boolean operations or, and, and not to prescribe selections in retrieval machines. He developed his own Zatocoding System in 1948 using superimposed subject codes on edge-notched cards. He coined the term "Information Retrieval" in 1950, and went on from there to obtain several patents in information retrieval and signaling, produce a text-handling language(TRAC), author some 200 publications, and form one of the first companies whose only concern was information. His thinking has affected all who are in the field of Information and his early ideas are now incorporated into today's reality.
Death
Mooers died in 1994 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mooers's article critical of John Vincent Atanasoff and his brief tenure as chief of a failed computer construction project at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory during World War II, was published posthumously in the May–June 2001 issue of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.
References
- ^ Mooers, C. (March 1950). "The theory of digital handling of non-numerical information and its implications to machine economics". Proceedings of the Meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery at Rutgers University.
- ^ Mooers, C. (1950). "Information retrieval viewed as temporal signaling" (PDF). Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians. 1: 572–573. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-05-23. Retrieved 2011-12-05.
- ^ "History of the R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S. - the R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S."
Sources
- Mooers, Calvin N. (April 2001). "The Computer Project at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory" (ISSN 1058-6180.
- Garfield, Eugene (1997-03-17). "A Tribute to Calvin N. Mooers, a Pioneer of Information Retrieval" (PDF). The Scientist. 11 (6): 9.
- Corbitt, Kevin D. (1995). "Calvin Mooers (1919-1994) Obituary" (PDF). IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 17 (3): 79–81. .
External links
- Calvin N. Mooers Papers, 1930–1992 at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.
- Oral history interview with Calvin N. Mooers and Charlotte D. Mooers at the Charles Babbage Institute. Interview discusses information retrieval and programming language research from World War II through the early 1990s.
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