If only they'd known

Getting information retrieval right this time:

At the height of the 1990’s information technology bubble, an information broker, researching a question for a client, called me and explained that her client was having a dispute with another dot-com company over which company had been the first to invent the idea of "push" technology, i.e., automatically sending information to people in interest areas they had designated in advance. The goal of the query was to determine that no third party had had the idea earlier.

I explained to the broker that the idea of "push" technology was first called "selective dissemination of information," or SDI, and, to my knowledge, had first been proposed in 1961 – yes, 1961 – in an article in the journal American Documentation by an IBM computer scientist by the name of H.P. Luhn (1961). He worked out the idea in considerable detail; the only key difference was that the old mainframe computer would spit out informative postcards to be mailed to customers, rather than sending the information online – since there was no "online" to use in those days.