The Role of Large Memories in Scientific Communications

Large memories provide automatic reference to millions of words of machine-readable coded information or to millions of images of document pages. Higher densities of storage will make possible low-cost memories of billions of words with access to any part in a few seconds or complete searches in minutes. These memories will serve as indexes to the deluge of technical literature when the problems of input and of the automatic generation of classification information are solved. Document files will make the indexed literature rapidly available to the searcher. However, memory capacity is currently well ahead of our ability to use it, and much work remains in this area. Machine translation of languages and recognition of spoken information are two other areas which will require fast, large memories.