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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 [...]

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