I have had a regular email account since my freshmen year at the University of Michigan in 1985. I’ll wait a second while you do the math. When I moved into the dorm I took the best graduation present this particular kid could imagine with me: one of the first Fat Macs. I’ll wait a second while you look up the term “Fat Mac”. Most of the kids in my hall didn’t have their own computers or, if they did, it was likely one of the first IBM PC clones. They were all desktops as laptops did not yet exist. Typewriters still outnumbered computers in my dorm.
Every student at Michigan received an email account on the mainframe-based Michigan Terminal System (MTS). I could access MTS in my room using a VT100 terminal emulator on my Mac and something called a line driver. The speed was pretty good. Having access to campus email in my room was an unbelievable luxury — then, as today, the Big Blue U runs on email.
The MTS system had three killer features for this emailing kid. The first was that you could recall and kill an email after you’d sent it. The second was that you could see the date and time the recipient read your email. The third was that the system, which was used by tens of thousands of people, could almost always find the person you were looking for, even if you misspelled their name. The first two killer features were possible because everyone’s email on campus was on the same machine (the big mainframe), that way it was relatively straightforward to pull off the seeming miracles of email recall and being able to look up when your email was read. I wasn’t even aware of that killer third feature (being able to find someone on the system easily even if you misspelled their name) because I hadn’t experienced any other kind of email system or user directory system before.
By the time I graduated in 1989, the Information Technology Division at UM had started the process of replacing the MTS system with something shiny and new. We would join the stampede towards client/server systems and “industry standard” solutions. One of the problems with replacing MTS was that it was very good. Its electronic mail and conferencing systems were excellent performers and were pretty much bullet-proof after having had thousands of people use them daily for years and years. Eventually, replacement systems were created and the MTS system was turned off to end-users on June 30, 1996. I attended the bizarre party at the Computing Center that was someone’s great idea to celebrate the demise of MTS. It was an awkward affair that had more in common with a wake than a party. The command was issued to cut user access, a manager whose job performance evaluation was tied to getting rid of the mainframe excitedly proclaimed, “That’s it!”, and everyone else sighed and looked like they had just experienced a death in the family.
The new mail system was okay, but everyone missed the ability to recall messages and to see when your messages were read. There was some complaining and campus IT management promised to “investigate possible solutions to these concerns”, which is IT speak for, “No!” I noticed that the new email system couldn’t find people easily the way the old one could. If you didn’t enter the name exactly right, you wouldn’t find who you were after. I wondered why the old system could do it and the new one couldn’t.
Life goes on. Eventually I accepted that annoyance along with the others and forgot about it. That’s Just the Way Things Are™.
Years went by. My career advanced. I changed jobs and eventually became the manager of Campus Computing Sites. My team was responsible for the University-supplied computers that were installed all over campus for student use. I happened to complain about the current campus-wide directory being unable to find people if you even slightly misspelled the name at the end of a staff meeting. Everyone in the room was close to my age or younger — except for one outlier — and they kind of shrugged and indicated That’s Just the Way Things Are™. Except there was another staff member in the room with us, our outlier. His name was Don Boettner. He started at the U in computing in 1962 and, among others things, wrote the command line interpreter for MTS and figured out how to get MTS to print to a Xerox 9700 laser printer — the first high volume laser printer.
“Oh, that’s because the MTS User Directory used Soundex,” he answered matter of factly.
“What is Soundex?” I asked, while my internal voice berated me for not asking Don this question years and years ago.
“Soundex is a way to index names phonetically. Each last name is run through the Soundex algorithm, which produces a numerical code based on the way that name sounds,” explained Don, “When you search on the name, it is the sound that is important, not the exact spelling.”
“Which is why MTS could almost always find who you were looking for and our new systems can’t find anything unless you spell it exactly right.”
“Yup.”
I was gobsmacked, “Why weren’t the new systems programmed using Soundex or something similar?”
Don then responded with the That’s Just the Way Things Are™ shrug and said, “It’s not like it is new technology. It was first patented sometime around World War I.”
The meeting broke up. My mind was reeling. How much time had people wasted fruitlessly typing guesses into the damn search box because some programmer somewhere couldn’t be bothered to implement an algorithm that was now almost 100 years old? What other gems are being lost along the way?
Understand that this is only one tiny computer science example. How many ancient Library of Alexandria equivalents do we dispose of each year in our careless, under-educated technological rush forward?
I went back to my office and researched Soundex, originally patented in 1918. I looked up the algorithm and ran my last name through it, producing “S 620” as the output. That sounded awfully familiar. I opened my wallet and pulled out my driver’s license. Turns out that the State of Michigan knows all about Soundex:
A portion of my Michigan driver license showing
that S 620 is the start of my license number.
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