On the preliminary report of C 3 S
David Lorge Parnas · Communications of the ACM · 1966
With many exciting ways to spend a billion dollars and ten thousand technical people, the burden of proof most certainly is on those who say "do it this way," rather than on the one who replies, "give me some reasons why you think that will work, but if you can't I'll only give you a million dollars to try to find some."A center for research in information retrieval seems a fine idea.But a giant implementation of the rather uninteresting system that would be designed today, even if it were to find some justification by cost accounting arguments, could so easily stultify imaginative research in a very weak, albeit promising, new field that is still groping for its basic tools and concepts.