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 directly [...]

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 Patent Office [...]

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 other search [...]

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, California. ESC had expertise in software [...]

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 as president, [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]