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The Application of Microcomputers to Aerospace and Defense Scientific and Technical Information Work

In 1978 the theme of Lecture Series 92 was the opportunity offered in automation of library and information
services by cheaper, faster minicomputer equipment, and new database and applications software. Speakers
addressed the feasibility of automation; the techniques for the necessary systems studies; and cost effectiveness in
units of tens of man years of programming and equipment costing $100,000 or more.

There is now a radical change in what an information specialist may reasonably expect, due largely to the
development of the low cost, reliable, general purpose microcomputer. Investments may start as small as
$2,0001for a simple word processor or $20,000 for a package of software and hardware which will serve a small
library. Software is being written for many tasks, and the best is of high quality and well documented.

The speakers in this lecture series report the growing role of the micro-computer in cataloguing and library
housekeeping; in accessing shared information resources through local and wide networks; and in new
approaches to information management and retrieval.

The scope of scientific and technical information work is wide, and depends on many skills in creating,
validating, organising and distributing textual, numeric and graphic material in a variety of forms to many
diverse users. The use of computers to support these processes has developed more and more rapidly from small
beginnings in the 1960’s, until nowadays it requires some effort to envisage such information systems - at least
for english language material, and in developed countries - without such an electronic infrastructure. Setting
aside, for later papers, questions of languages and state of technological development, it seems only reasonable
to survey, if not fully to explain, how such a narrow aspect of technology as the general purpose microcomputer
has come to be so significant a component of the information specialist’s resources. A start may be made
through a series of ‘snapshots’ of what was going on at a few sampling points in the last decade.