I was hired away from StorageTek to head a new project at IHS. They re-published Mil-Specs, Fed-Specs, and a broad collection of vendor catalogs indexed and cross-referenced by industry standard and Mil/Fed Specification so that any government or military contractor could review, bid and perform on a contract, finding vendor parts matching both the contract requirements and the applicable specifications. At that time, the entire product line was published on microfilm and microfiche. This new project was an exploratory demonstration to put the products on the newly invented Video Disc technology.
Since market penetration of video discs was very low, and cost of development was high, that project was put on hold until the technology matured.
For my next task I shipped out to Stanford University to work on a project with Prof. Donald Knuth and senior graduate student David Fuchs to port a copy of the TEX typesetting language to our IBM mainframe and connect that to a digital phototypesetter. This was used to format the output of the huge databases for the product directories.
While at Stanford, David showed me a computer network that he called ARPANET, and it had 18 computers connected across the country. In retrospect, that was the beginning of the internet, but at the time I didn’t appreciate its significance.
In addition I worked on loan with the sister company BRS/Search in Latham, NY where I worked programming the MEDLARS database.