Jeremy Norman’sHistoryofInformation.com Exploring the History of Information and Media through Timelines
Jeremy Norman’s
A: Yorktown Heights, New York, United States
"The IBM 704 Computer (1954). The first mass-produced computer with core memory and floating-point arithmetic, whose designers included John Backus, formerly of IBM Watson Laboratory at Columbia University (who also was the principal designer of FORTRAN, the first widespread high-level language for computer programming), as well as Gene Amdahl (who would go on to become chief architect for the IBM 360 and later start his own company to rival IBM). The 704's 6-bit BCD character set and 36-bit word account for FORTRAN's 6-character limit on identifiers."
In 1958 Hans Peter Luhn of IBM developed an automatic document indexing program for the production of literature abstracts.
"The complete text of an article in machine-readable form is scanned by an IBM 704 data-processing machine and analyzed in accordance with a standard program. Statistical information derived from word frequency and distribution is used by the machine to compute a relative measure of significance, first for individual words and then for sentences. Sentences scoring highest in significance are extracted and printed out to become the "auto-abstract."