Patricia Wier, EB, Marvin Minsky, MIT, and Alan Kay
Britannica had first acquired a large mainframe computer in the 1960s. It had primarily been used to manage the company’s direct mail and installment sales activities, though it also did the usual accounting applications and managed the payroll and [...]
Solving the PC Data Storage Problem
Britannica editor Warren Preece had been able to foresee the possibility of an optical disc encyclopedia because of breakthrough engineering developments that had taken place in Europe and Japan. Klass Compaan, a physicist with Philips research based in Netherlands, [...]
Reinventing the Encyclopedia in Electronic Form
In 1981, Tom Goetz’s retired predecessor Warren Preece published “Notes Towards a New Encyclopedia.” In this article, Preece described the coming electronic encyclopedia. As one of the architects of the 15th Edition, Preece was intimately familiar with the dense [...]
Charles Van Doren, EB Editorial Vice President
In 1962, Adler’s young friend and acolyte Charles Van Doren had received a suspended sentence following his conviction in New York State for perjury in the investigation into the fixed television game shows of the late 1950s. As a [...]
Mortimer Adler, Philosopher
Mortimer J. Adler, a precocious student (and later critic) of philosopher John Dewey at Columbia University, had also been attracted to the University of Chicago in the 1930s. Hutchins had found appointments for him in philosophy and psychology and [...]
Robert Hutchins, University of Chicago President
Benton had been recruited to the University of Chicago in 1937 by his fellow student in the Yale College Class of 1924, then Chicago’s president, Robert Maynard Hutchins. Hutchins was one of the 20th century’s most prominent intellects and [...]
William Benton, EB Owner and Publisher
Paralleling this whole development of the computer, encyclopedists at Encyclopaedia Britannica had been thinking long and hard about the proper structure of a modern encyclopedia and how it might be conjoined with an appropriate human/machine interface adapted to the [...]
The Encyclopedist’s Art
In the twentieth century, encyclopedists were not the only people to worry about how to facilitate access to an ever-growing sum of knowledge. The problem arising from the information explosion of modern times was also noticed by those who [...]
A Milestone in Evolution of the Human/Machine Interface
Who would have guessed that at the end of the 20th century it would be a company founded in Scotland in 1768 that would invent a key part of the mechanics that would let people intuitively navigate the electronic [...]