The purpose of this post is to bring attention to the device that was, or actually still is – FOSDIC.
Am I weird for sending an email to Herb Johnson saying thank you for his write-up on FOSDIC? The reason I did this is because there is in essence nothing on the subject. As I have said previously, it is not even mentioned on Wikipedia.
I get it, that joke is old by now.
Anyway, I thought I would shed some light on this thing, since pretty much no one seems to know about FOSDIC.
So, what is this… FOSDIC?
FOSDIC is the abbreviation of Film-Optical Sensing Device for Input to Computer, which essentially is an old scanner type thingy for automated input of census data, among other things. It was developed in co-operation by the U.S. Census Bureau (then U.S. Bureau of the Census) and the National Bureau of Standards (wherein “National” means American) in the early 1950’s and was first used in for the American 1960 census.
The first FOSDIC used by the Census Bureau was not completely automated – staff still had to manually make photocopies on negative microfilm for the device to read. Later versions automated this process as well, speeding up processing times significantly, which also was the main reason for developing FOSDIC. The first generation saved around $6 million on input costs and reduced the time it took to around an eighth or a seventh compared to the census ten years before (that being the 1950 census).
If you want to read my full report on FOSDIC, you can do so here. I linked the revisited version because I wanted to.
In a foreseeable future I will also write a post on the art of googling, as there seems to be a major lack of how to use that search engine properly. But for now I already have two posts planned for the next couple of days.
Thank you for reading.
ostlundk 