Corpus linguistics milestones

Mechanical calculating machines

Karl Pearson used Brunsviga for his calculations. He also laid the groundwork for statistical analyses which are still widely used in many disciplines including corpus linguistics.

Brown corpus on punch cards

The original Brown corpus was stored on almost 100k punch cards.

LOB concordances on microfiches

While the LOB corpus was available on a magnetic tape for a mainframe computer, the concordances were made available on michcrofiches; there used to be a microfiche reader in every library.

Mainframe computers (IBM 4341 System)

Corpus data were typically processed on mainframe machines. The access to these machines was limited to large institutions and the tasks performed on these machines had to be scheduled (time sharing).

Micro OCP

Micro OCP is the second version of the program, originally released in 1981. It requires using a set of commands stored and run from a commands file.

Longman Mini-Concordancer

Longman Mini-Concordancer introduced drop-down menus to navigate through a variety of functions that could be used to analyse a corpus.

MicroConcord (Scott & Johns)

MicroConcord allows searching corpora, creating worlists and collocation lists. It was particularly useful for creating early DDL materials.