HOW CLOSE WE CAME

We take for granted a world of bibliographic and text retrieval in which all of the major systems look very similar and depend upon explicit boolean retrieval commands, offering no alternative retrieval mechanisms. This similarity is not intrinsic to the requirements of automated information retrieval systems, but is in fact mere historic happenstance. Indeed, we came very close instead to living for the last 20 years in a world of much more sophisticated information retrieval systems. This brief communication reviews those now almost forgotten events that set us on our present course.