Logo of System Development Corporation

I came to Southern California to become a graduate student in film at UCLA. After my first year as a student, I needed an income, as my parents weren’t able to foot the bill for me much longer. In March 1968, I visited the job counseling center on campus and applied for a job at a Santa Monica tech company called System Development Corporation, or SDC.

The job was for an interesting project. The Air Force’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) had funded SDC’s Lexicography and Discourse project. The work done previously was to key in the complete contents of two dictionaries—the Merriam-Webster Seventh Collegiate Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary—onto paper tape. Included were definitions, pronunciations, and etymologies. The paper tape had been converted to IBM punch cards, which were printed out. The printouts of the two dictionaries was in two piles that ran floor to ceiling of the office I was to use.

Interestingly, my predecessor in the position was murdered by a UCLA graduate student from the film department. I never was to find out who did it.

For the next couple of years, I proofread the transcriptions of both dictionaries and made corrections to the data files, which resided on a military AN/FSQ-32 computer whose parts were encased in epoxy so as to be able to survive a nuclear attack. Unfortunately, it had a single I/O channel, so that if a large number of users were logged in, as was the usual case, simple transactions took forever on the computer’s primitive time-sharing system.

If you are interested in finding out more about the project, you can see the document that described the project: Two Dictionary Transcripts and Programs for Parsing Them. Volume I. The Encoding Scheme, PARSENT and CONIX by Richard Reichert, John Olney, and James Paris (that’s me). It is still available from the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC).

Incidentally, ARPA also created the Internet. It was originally designed to allow for uninterrupted communications between two points when certain key cities in between were destroyed by nuclear bombs.