History
SPIRES was originally developed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in 1969, from a design based on a 1967 information study of physicists at SLAC. The system was designed as a physics database management system (DBMS) to deal with high-energy-physics preprints. Written in PL/I, SPIRES ran on an IBM mainframe.
In the early 1970s, an evaluation of this system resulted in the decision to implement a new system for use by faculty, staff and students at Stanford University. SPIRES was renamed the Stanford Public Information Retrieval System. The new development took place under a National Science Foundation grant headed by Edwin B. Parker, principal investigator. SPIRES joined forces with the BALLOTS project to create a bibliographic citation retrieval system and quickly evolved into a generalized information retrieval and data base management system that could meet the needs of a large and diverse computing community.
SPIRES was rewritten in PL360, a block structured programming language designed explicitly for IBM/360-compatible hardware. The primary authors were: Thomas H. Martin, Dick Guertin and Bill Kiefer. John Schroeder was the manager of the SPIRES project during this early phase of development.
Eventually, BALLOTS split off from SPIRES and the Research Libraries Group adopted SPIRES as its data base engine while providing a graphical interface to its clients. Socrates was a library circulation management system rooted in SPIRES.
SPIRES became the primary database management system for Stanford University business and student services in the 1980s and 1990s. It was also adopted by about two dozen other universities, including installations using the Michigan Terminal System (MTS), and VM/CMS. These universities collaborated through annual meetings of the SPIRES Consortium.
In 2004, SPIRES was migrated off the mainframe onto Unix platforms by means of an IBM-mainframe Emulator developed by Dick Guertin. The DBMS now runs on Unix, Linux or Darwin (operating system) and is available under Mozilla Public License.
Read more about this topic: Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System
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