Automatic Language Translator IBM ' s Automatic Translator was a machine translation system that converted Russian documents into English . The Translator used an optical disk that stored 170 , 000 word - for - word and statement - for - statement translations and a custom computer to look them up at high speed . Built for the US Air Force ' s Foreign Technology Division , the AN / GSQ - 16 ( or XW - 2 ) , as it was known to the Air Force , was primarily used to convert Soviet technical documents for distribution to western scientists . The Translator was installed in 1959 , dramatically upgraded in 1964 , and was eventually replaced by a mainframe running SYSTRAN in 1970 . History . Photoscopic store . The Translator can trace its history to a June 1953 contract from the US Navy to the International Telemeter Corporation ( ITC ) of Los Angeles . This was not for a translation system , but a pure research and development contract for a high - performance photographic online storage medium consisting of small black rectangles embedded in a plastic disk . When the initial contract ran out , what was then the Rome Air Development Center ( RADC ) took up further funding in 1954 and onwards . The system was developed by Gilbert King , chief of engineering at ITC , along with a team that included Louis Ridenour . It evolved into a 16 inch plastic disk with data recorded as a series of microscopic black rectangles or clear spots . Only the outermost 4 inches of the disk were used for storage , which increased the linear speed of the portion being accessed . When the disk spun at 2 , 400 RPM it had an access speed of about 1 Mbit / sec . In total , the system stored 30 Mbits , making it the highest density online system of its era . Mark I . In 1954 IBM gave an influential demonstration of machine translation , known today as the " Georgetown - IBM experiment " . Run on an IBM 704 mainframe , the translation system knew only 250 words of Russian limited to the field of organic chemistry , and only 6 grammar rules for combining them . Nevertheless the results were extremely promising , and widely reported in the press . At the time , most researchers in the nascent machine translation field felt that the major challenge to providing reasonable translations was building a large library , as storage devices of the era were both too small and too slow to be useful in this role . King felt that the photoscopic store was a natural solution to the problem , and pitched the idea of an automated translation system based on the photostore to the Air Force . RADC proved interested , and provided a research grant in May 1956 . At the time , the Air Force also provided a grant to researchers at the University of Washington who were working on the problem of producing an optimal translation dictionary for the project . King advocated a simple word - for - word approach to translations . He thought that the natural redundancies in language would allow even a poor translation to be understood , and that local context was alone enough to provide reasonable guesses when faced with ambiguous terms . He stated that " the success of the human in achieving a probability of . 50 in anticipating the words in a sentence is largely due to his experience and the real meanings of the words already discovered . " In other words , simply translating the words alone would allow a human to effectively read a document , because they would be able to reason out the proper meaning from the context provided by earlier words . In 1958 King moved to IBM ' s Thomas J . Watson Research Center , and continued development of the photostore - based translator . Over time , King changed the approach from a pure word - for - word translator to one that stored " stems and endings " , which broke words into parts that could be combined back together to form complete words again . The first machine , " Mark I " , was demonstrated in July 1959 and consisted of a 65 , 000 word dictionary and a custom tube - based computer to do the lookups . Texts were hand - copied onto punched card s using custom Cyrillic terminals , and then input into the machine for translation . The results were less than impressive , but were enough to suggest that a larger and faster machine would be a reasonable development . In the meantime , the Mark I was applied to translations of the Soviet newspaper , " Pravda " . The results continued to be questionable , but King declared it a success , stating in " Scientific American " that the system was " . . . found , in an operational evaluation , to be quite useful by the Government . " Mark II . On 4 October 1957 the USSR launched Sputnik 1 , the first artificial satellite . This caused a wave of concern in the US , whose own Project Vanguard was caught flat - footed and then proved to repeatedly fail in spectacular fashion . This embarrassing turn of events led to a huge investment in US science and technology , including the formation of DARPA , NASA and a variety of intelligence efforts that would attempt to avoid being surprised in this fashion again . After a short period , the intelligence efforts centralized at the Wright Patterson Air Force Base as the Foreign Technology Division ( FTD , now known as the National Air and Space Intelligence Center ) , run by the Air Force with input from the DIA and other organizations . FTD was tasked with the translation of Soviet and other Warsaw Bloc technical and scientific journals so researchers in the " west " could keep up to date on developments behind the Iron Curtain . Most of these documents were publicly available , but FTD also made a number of one - off translations of other materials upon request . Assuming there was a shortage of qualified translators , the FTD became extremely interested in King ' s efforts at IBM . Funding for an upgraded machine was soon forthcoming , and work began on a " Mark II " system based around a transistorized computer with a faster and higher - capacity 10 inch glass - based optical disk spinning at 2 , 400 RPM . Another addition was an optical character reader provided by the third party , which they hoped would eliminate the time consuming process of copying the Russian text into machine - readable cards . In 1960 the Washington team also joined IBM , bringing their dictionary efforts with them . The dictionary continued to expand as additional storage was made available , reaching 170 , 000 words and terms by the time it was installed at the FTD . A major software update was also incorporated in the Mark II , which King referred to as " dictionary stuffing " . Stuffing was an attempt to deal with the problems of ambiguous words by " stuffing " prefixes onto them from earlier words in the text . These modified words would match with similarly stuffed words in the dictionary , making the matches more unique . In 1962 King left IBM for Itek , a military contractor in the process of rapidly acquiring new technologies . Development at IBM continued , and the system went fully operational at FTD in February 1964 . The system was demonstrated at the 1964 New York World ' s Fair . The version at the Fair included a 150 , 000 word dictionary , with about 1 / 3 of the words in phrases . About 3 , 500 of these were stored in core memory to improve performance , and an average speed of 20 words per minute was claimed . The results of the carefully selected input text was quite impressive . After its return to the FTD , it was used continually until 1970 , when it was replaced by a machine running SYSTRAN . ALPAC Report . In 1964 the United States Department of Defense commissioned the United States National Academy of Sciences ( NAS ) to prepare a report on the state of machine translation . The NAS formed the " Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee " , or " ALPAC " , and published their findings in 1966 . The report , " Language and Machines : Computers in Translation and Linguistics " , was highly critical of the existing efforts , demonstrating that the systems were no faster than human translations , while also demonstrating that the supposed lack of translators was in fact a surplus , and as a result of supply and demand issues , human translation was relatively inexpensive — about $ 6 per 1 , 000 words . Worse , the FTD was slower as well ; tests using physics papers as input demonstrated that the Translator was " 10 percent less accurate , 21 percent slower , and had a comprehension level 29 percent lower than when he used human translation . " The ALPAC report was as influential as the Georgetown experiment had been a decade earlier ; in the immediate aftermath of its publication , the US government suspended almost all funding for machine translation research . Ongoing work at IBM and Idek had ended by 1966 , leaving the field to the Europeans , who continued development of systems like SYSTRAN and Logos . References . Notes . ^ These numbers for the early disk systems appear to be inaccurate — another document from the same author suggests that these figures are actually for the later version used on the Mark II translator .