Calvin Northrup Mooers (October 24, 1919 – December 1, 1994), was an American computer scientist known for his work in information retrieval and for the programming language TRAC.
He worked at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory from 1941 to 1946, and then attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a master's degree in mathematics and physics.
he developed a mechanical system using superimposed codes of descriptors for information retrieval called Zatocoding.
He coined the term "information retrieval", using it first in a conference paper presented in March 1950.
Mooers's article critical of John Vincent Atanasoff and his brief tenure as chief of a failed computer construction project at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory during World War II, was published posthumously in the May–June 2001 issue of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.