In the early 1960s, Barry S. Brook created a standardized form that RILM’s New York offices used to collect abstracts. Printed on thin, color-coded paper, these forms enabled RILM’s first editors to organize and edit submissions efficiently. Each color represented a different language: green for German, yellow for English, orange for Italian, pink for Spanish, and red for Russian. RILM distributed these forms worldwide. As Executive Editor Zdravko Blazeković recalls, the forms were a familiar sight on university campuses around the globe–he first encountered them as a graduate student in Zagreb, long before he later joined RILM in New York.
Editors first filled out the paper forms by hand before transferring the information into an IBM SG360 computer. Used from 1965 to 1978, the SG360 was the first family of computers designed to support both commercial and scientific applications, offering models that ranged from small entry-level systems to large mainframes. The early data-entry program the editors worked with was WYLBUR, a text editor and word processor introduced in 1967. Beyond RILM, WYLBUR was also used at institutions such as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), and numerous other sites.
