MT was proposed seriously by the late 1940s, soon after the birth of the computer (Weaver, 1949 (Weaver, /1955 . In 1954, the first public demonstration of an MT system prototype (Dostert, 1955) led to great excitement in the press (Hutchins, 1997). The next decade saw a great flowering of ideas, prefiguring most subsequent developments. But this work was ahead of its time-implementations were limited by, for example, the fact that pending the development of disks there was no good way to store dictionary information.