If you want to sell an idea who do you go to? To the big bosses
who hold the purse strings, or the grass roots users who utilise
the network. I think I prefer the latter.
<< Now we prepare the ground >> ( An introduction to WAIS )
Excepts from BYTE May 1991. "Browsing through terabytes"
" WAIS is an engineering effort spearheaded by Thinking machines,
the manufacture of the Connection Machine, a massively parrallel
super computer."
"The Libary of congress archives roughly 25 terabytes in its
collection. To browse through this volume on your own would be
nearly impossible"
" WAIS can distill the contents of archives into neatly
manageable and browsable folders"
" With Relevance feedback WAIS can retreive documents with
greater ease and speed "
" The WAIS protocol also lets you use English-language-style
query lexicon instead of cryptic SQL or forth generation
languages"
"The DowQUEST runs on Connection machine... has 1 gigabyte of
text derived from over 400 sources... the search time with a
hundred word query composed in typed english... is less than half
a second."
"The projections for the connection Machine system indicate that
when it is scaled to a 1 terabyte database with a ten word query
obtaining an answer within 10 sec or less is highly probable."
Rob "I have seen the future and it is big" Harper
