Direct Coding of English Language Names
D. A. Brace · The Computer Journal · 1963
Bookshops send orders to Book Centre Ltd. listing the titles of the books they require but not their catalogue numbers. Before an invoice can be produced by their IBM 1401 computer, the address code of each title must be found manually from an alphabetical list containing 19,000 titles. This paper describes a method by which the computer is programmed to locate the address directly from a punched card carrying an abbreviated form of the title, thus avoiding the manual searching procedure. The interest of the paper lies in the rules for abbreviating book titles to the minimum number of characters consistent with sufficient discrimination between titles and ease of working by normal punch operators.