MEDLINE went live for the first time on October 27, 1971.
From the article:
* In 1971, according to the September-October National Library of Medicine NEWS of that year, MEDLINE featured 239 indexed journals. In 2006, that number has grown to 4,928.
* In 1971, MEDLINE served 25 users. (As that same issue of the NLM NEWS reported, "By January 1972, it is planned that the network will be extended so that the computer can be reached by a local call in at least twenty major cities.") In 2006, MEDLINE/PubMed will average 77 million unique visits in 2006 and about 800 million searches.
* In 1971, MEDLINE was available via dial-up telecommunications. "Each user of the service will pay for his own terminal and telephone costs." In 2006, the site is available to anyone on earth via the World Wide Web.
* In 1971, MEDLINE operated on an IBM 360/50 mainframe computer. In 2006, MEDLINE/PubMed runs on 20 Dell PowerEdge 1850 Servers, 2 CPU 8Gb RAM, with the Linux operating system in 64-bit mode.
* View photographs of NLM's various computers from the 1960s to the present at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/news/history_nlm_computerroom.pdf (PDF, 5.6MB)
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