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.
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.
[3] 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 disc 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.
"[7] 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.