He also described it as a hierarchical system: Set your terminal to "research." Punch parameters in succession "North American culture," "English-speaking," "mid-twentieth century," "comedians,", "the World's Greatest Authority." The answer you can expect is "Professor Irwin Corey." You'll find his routines timeless humor.
Mind you, this is after Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" and Memex, which got many people excited about the idea. This in turn was influenced by earlier investigations by Davis and Draeger in 1935 on searching with microfilm.
In the last year I've been researching earlier information systems, including those of the punch card era. Calvin Mooers, in his paper "Making Information Retrieval Pay", which coined the term "information retrieval", proposes a mechanical search engine called DOKEN which could handle Heinlein's proposed query (see http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=4243 ), except that "Professor Irwin Corey" is too specific to be an index query using Zatocoding.
Mind you, this is after Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" and Memex, which got many people excited about the idea. This in turn was influenced by earlier investigations by Davis and Draeger in 1935 on searching with microfilm.
In the last year I've been researching earlier information systems, including those of the punch card era. Calvin Mooers, in his paper "Making Information Retrieval Pay", which coined the term "information retrieval", proposes a mechanical search engine called DOKEN which could handle Heinlein's proposed query (see http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=4243 ), except that "Professor Irwin Corey" is too specific to be an index query using Zatocoding.