Calvin Mooers


Calvin Northrup Mooers, was an American computer scientist known for his work in information retrieval and for the programming language TRAC.

Early life

Mooers was a native of Minneapolis, Minnesota, attended the University of Minnesota, and received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1941. He worked at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory from 1941 to 1946, and then attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a master's degree in mathematics and physics. At M.I.T. he developed a mechanical system using superimposed codes of descriptors for information retrieval called Zatocoding. He founded the Zator Company in 1947 to market this idea, and pursued work in information theory, information retrieval, and artificial intelligence.
He coined the term "information retrieval" using it first in a conference paper presented in March 1950. See also a short paper published later that year from Mooers.

Mooers's law

He coined "Mooers's law" and its corollary in 1959:

TRAC

He founded the Rockford Research Institute in 1961, where he developed the TRAC programming language, and attempted to control its distribution and development using trademark law and a unique invocation of
copyright. The trademark strategy was later used by Ada.

Awards

Mooers received the American Society for Information Science's Award of Merit in 1978. The citation reads in part:

Death

Mooers died in 1994 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mooers's article critical of John Vincent Atanasoff and his brief tenure as chief of a failed computer construction project at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory during World War II, was published posthumously in the May–June 2001 issue of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.