Whole Science Fiction Index

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The Whole Science Fiction Index was a project launched in the 1980s to provide a comprehensive bibliography of science fiction literature. It should not only show work titles and editions, but also stories, etc. contained in magazines and compilations, and thus would have corresponded in size to today's Internet Speculative Fiction Database . The initiator and operator of the project was the American science fiction fan Kurt Baty. He began to build a database, said he, the Reflex Plus - RDBMS company Borland used that on a Macintosh running Computers. From spring 1988 he published extracts from this database in loose-leaf form under the title The Whole Science Fiction Data Base Quarterly, each with a volume of around 100 to 200 pages. By the winter of 1989, 8 issues of the Quarterly had appeared . It then turned out that the size of the database had meanwhile become too much for the software. The Reflex Plus product was no longer supported and Baty was unable to migrate the data to other software and hardware. The Whole Science Fiction Index was one of the first projects of its kind and unique in scope and ambition in a time years before the emergence of the Internet and the associated possibilities for collaborative work on large database projects.

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