The Univac Bible
Indexing every word with zeroes and ones.
Chris Wild
1955
When the Revised Standard Version of the Bible released in the 1950s, computer geniuses streamlined a way to document its changes, starting with the text's "concordance."A concordance is an alphabetical index of every key word in a given book, with each word’s location and context within the text. Accurately compiling a concordance is a tremendously labor-intensive project, and has historically only been done for the most important documents. It took James Strong 30 years to assemble one for the King James Bible, a task he completed in 1894.Rev. John W. Ellison, a mathematics enthusiast, realized a computer might be able to accomplish such a project in a fraction of the time. He proposed the idea to the Remington Rand company.The company agreed to tackle the concordance with a computer called Univac, and selected John Graham and Al Bosgang to program it.
It is an extremely fast moron. It will, at the speed of light, do exactly what it is told to do — no more, no less. - Dr. Grace Murray Hopper
Five women spent spent five months transcribing the Bible’s approximately 800,000 words into binary code on magnetic tape. A second set of tapes was produced separately to weed out typing mistakes. It took Univac five hours to compare the two sets and ensure the accuracy of the transcription. The computer then spat out a list of all words, then a narrower list of key words.The biggest challenge was how to teach Univac to gather the right amount of context with each word. Bosgang spent 13 weeks composing the 1,800 instructions necessary to make it work.Once that was done, the concordance was alphabetized, and converted from binary code to readable type, producing a final 2,000-page book.All told, the computer shaved an estimated 23 years off the whole process.
