User:Ray3055/MEDLARS (notes

Initial development of MEDLARS
Since 1879, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) has published the Index Medicus, a monthly guide to medical articles in thousands of journals, the huge volume of bibliographic citations were manually compiled at a cost of millions of dollars annualy. In 1957 the staff of the NLM started to plan the mechanization of the Index Medicus, what was needed was a way to manipulate all of this informaion to produce subsidiary products. By 1960 a detailed specification was prepared and by the Spring of 1961 a request for proposals was sent out to 72 companies to develop the system. As a result a contract was awarded to the General Electric Company. The computer (a Minneapolis-Honeywell 800) which was to run MEDLARS was delivered to the NLM in March 1963, and Frank Bradway Rogers (Director of the NLM 1949 to 1963) said at the time "..If all goes well, the January 1964 issue of Index Medicus wil be ready to emerge from the system at the end of this year. It may be that this will mark the beginning of a new era in medical bibliography."

The cost of devlopment of MEDLARS was $3 million, and at the time of its completion no other publicly available fully operational electronic storage and retrieval system of its magnitude existed. The original computer configuration operated from 1964 until its replacement by MEDLARS II in January 1975.

Later versions
need to research further, some sources conflict with information.

Batch mode. 3-6 weeks to get results!/next day? need to get further data.
 * MEDLARS I - 1964

Planning for a more powerful system, MEDLARS II, started in 1968. however the original contractor ran behind on development and their contract was cancelled. Subsequently a contract was negotiated with Systems Development Corporation who produced an interim system that merged MEDLARS I with an already successful on-line retrieval system AIM-TWX (Abridged Index Medicus via the Teletypewriter Exchange Network; because the TWX network costs were high NLM contracted with Tymeshare Inc., to provide the data communications, and the MEDLINE (MEDLARS Online) service became operational by October 1971; The completely new MEDLARS II system became operational in 1975 and was connected to Tymnet in 1977.
 * MEDLARS II -

on-line interactive - natural language?
 * MEDLARS III - approx 1985?

1990's Internet/WWW - commercial MEDLINE conflicts etc