Example of CHIPS photo (from 1947):
former MITRE president, Robert R. Everett, riding an aircraft simulator called the Control Force Demonstrator

A new external web site at MITRE combines "ancient" computer history with current Internet technology. The Computer History Internet Picture Service (CHIPS) is a web-based, searchable showcase of images from three different computer-history photo collections reaching back almost five decades. CHIPS provides the public with seamless searching of separate photo databases and returns results as ranked thumbnail images, accompanied by data describing each photograph.

The technology behind CHIPS is the Imagery Product Server (IPS), which is software developed by MITRE's Paul Silvey. In 1995 Paul, along with MITRE archivist David Baldwin, demonstrated IPS at an International archivist's conference in Washington. IPS demonstrated how to access, retrieve, and download 100 MITRE archived photos quickly.

Many photo archivists at the conference saw the potential for IPS technology to store and retrieve their photographic archives. In particular, The Charles Babbage Institute in Minnesota and The Computer Museum in Boston became interested in working with MITRE to develop a unified software solution for accessing photos on-line from their collections. The three organizations formed a joint venture, and agreed to host the CHIPS database, which draws from each organization's archived computer history collection. In addition, MITRE agreed to host the IPS software on its external server.

MITRE contributed a series of photos published in a book called Project Whirlwind: The History of a Pioneer Computer by Kent Redmond and Thomas Smith. The Whirlwind computer was a prehistoric MITRE milestone developed in the 1940s, when MITRE was still part of MIT. It was the first real-time computer using magnetic memory, and it will appear in a television series about 20th century inventions to be aired on PBS's "Nova" this winter.

CHIPS's backbone, the Imagery Product Server, uses the Harvest architecture, statistical information retrieval algorithms, a relational database management system, and a World Wide Web interface. The Harvest architecture divides the problem of distributed information publishing, indexing, and retrieval into tasks that are handled by software components known as Providers, Gatherers, Brokers, and Clients. The Imagery Product Server (IPS) software can accommodate any type of formatted product such as images, briefing slides, clip-art, and word processing files by gathering the document's descriptive metadata into a summary object interchange file, which is then used to populate a searchable relational database.

From a web interface, quick-text searches and form-based queries are used to retrieve these products and their associated data quickly. Products are not really stored in the database; instead, they are indexed through a relational database, which makes querying the products and data quick and efficient. This characteristic of IPS Brokers allows information products (published documents) to be distributed and maintained separately from the Internet search engine that indexes and retrieves their metadata. IPS also incorporates wavelet imagery compression and decompression technology (another MITRE research project) to assist with the rapid delivery of large images, a current problem with on-line web systems.

Other applications of the IPS technology being used at MITRE are a server to store MITRE's collection of clip art and digital photographs on-line, a digital raster map server, and a server for storing Microsoft PowerPoint briefing slides from a recent Fort Franklin exercise at Hanscom Air Force Base. Also, several of MITRE's government sponsors are using IPS for storage and retrieval of scanned documents, journal abstracts, and photos for use within the Intelligence Community via the classified Intelink and Intelink-S networks.

With CHIPS, MITRE uses technology to solve unique problems for diverse groups such as museums and academia that are not well served by the current market. CHIPS is a scaleable system that allows organizations to share their collections with the public and to form ventures with other organizations with whom they would not ordinarily collaborate. MITRE is also offering the IPS source code to share its technology for continued development of the IPS software.

For more information, please contact Diane Howard using the employee directory.