Appendix 2 – The Building of Britannica Online
Buy Book The Building of Britannica Online By Robert McHenry Former Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopaedia Britannica Introduction Had someone back about 1985 phrased his question, wittingly or not, “Has the Britannica been digitized yet?” the answer would [...]
Appendix 1 – Excerpts from Encyclopaedia Britannica Petition for a Writ of Certiorari in the Supreme Court of the United States
Buy Book Appendix 2 QUESTIONS PRESENTED In the 1980s, Petitioner Encyclopaedia Britannica (“Britannica”) developed a pioneering multimedia search system that, for the first time, was able to search through vast amounts of multimedia [...]
Acknowledgments
Buy Book Appendix 1 This book could not have been written without the help and support of family, friends, and colleagues at The Cliff Dwellers club in Chicago. My wife Cathy without complaint stoically [...]
A Look Back from Encyclopaedia Britannica
Acknowledgements Looking back on my Encyclopaedia Britannica days, when I departed United Press International after its bankruptcy, UPI was fortunately headed towards a reorganization and not a liquidation. Though I had been with UPI only two years, it had [...]
Compton’s Patent R.I.P.—An Afterthought
Next When the Patent Office reversed course in 1994 and withdrew the patent it had issued just the year before, Britannica challenged the action and brought suit. Years later, a federal district court in Washington, D.C., found the [...]
Dr. Stanley Frank, Vice President, Development
Next Thus, from the beginning, the novel idea of developing an architecture based upon multiple search paths to related information was central to the product. Also fundamental to the design were reciprocal hyperlinks between related data contained in [...]
Harold Kester, SmarTrieve, and Compton’s Encyclopedia
Next Harold Kester After further analyzing the potential market for such a work, Stanley Frank, in charge of development by then, decided in 1988 to partner in its development with Education Systems Corporation of San Diego, [...]
Peter Norton Takes Britannica into the Software Business
Next Although not willing to follow Wier’s advice in 1983, Britannica’s board of directors did believe the company needed to get closer to the emerging personal computer market. That year, Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Corporation, which I later served [...]
Patricia Wier, EB, Marvin Minsky, MIT, and Alan Kay
Next 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 [...]
