An interesting (I think) thing about me is that I'm a second generation search guy. My father (searchdad?) worked at the Computation Center of the National Research Council of Canada, where he designed and helped build CAN/OLE (Canadian On-Line Enquiry) for the Canadian Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI). CAN/OLE offered access to a number of databases like Inspec.
I'm giving a talk in a couple of weeks that includes a couple of slides on the history of IR and I send dad email asking what the properties of the CAN/OLE collections were like. They were (I'd say) big for the time: between 5 and 15 million records (although the records were only a few hundred bytes --- this wasn't full text!) and somewhere between 3 and 6 GB of storage (on IBM 3330 disks, mind you, so we're talking a lot of floor space here!).
Dad mentioned that a google search for cisti +ole would yield some hits, and look what I found, Dad's even mentioned by name as the designer and one of the implementers. Cool!
The picture is my father and me circa 1976, about two years after CAN/OLE launched. I picked the picture out of a collection of family pictures that he sent me last year. As I was clipping us out, I realized that he's about 3 years younger in that picture than I am now. Yikes. Up until my father, the family profession was carpenter. I guess that now it's Information Retrieval. I'd better get cracking with my son!
