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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Next 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 [...]

Next Warren E. Preece, Encyclopaedia Britannica Editor 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 [...]

Next Charles Van Doren 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 [...]

Next 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 [...]

Next 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 [...]

Next William Benton, Publisher of Encyclopaedia Britannica 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 [...]