Fifty years ago today (7 January 1954) the first public demonstration of a MT system was held in New York at the head office of IBM. The demonstration was widely reported in the newspapers and received much public interest. The system itself, however, was no more than what today would be called a "toy" system, having just 250 words and translating just 49 carefully selected Russian sentences into English -- mainly in the field of chemistry. Nevertheless it encouraged the view that MT was imminent -- and in particular stimulated the financing of MT research, not just in the US but worldwide.
To find out more see the article on my website http://ourworld.compuserve.com/WJHutchins. You will find there also further references, and the sentences used in the original demo: http://.../WJHutchins/Russian-GU-1954.doc John Hutchins 7 Jan 2004 -- For MT-List info, see http://www.eamt.org/mt-list.html
