PREPARATION THUS FAR
A great deal of preliminary preparation has already taken
place and I would like to briefly outline what this has
been.
1. A picture file of approximately 15,000 Napoleonic
subjects has been collected, cataloged and indexed, on
IBM aperture cards. The retrieval system is based on
subject classification, but a special visual signaling
method allows cross indexing to any degree of complexity.
...
6. A master biographical file on the principal 50
characters in the story has been prepared by graduate
history students of Oxford University. They have taken
the highlights of each person's life, putting a single
event and its date on a single 3 x 5 index card. These
cards have all been integrated in a date order file with
special signals indicating the names of the characters.
The system allows you to instantly determine what any of
the 50 people were doing on any given date.
I would love to know whether these files (in the literal meaning!) still exist. Would be quite intriguing to play with them. In the production notes he also describes that some of the battle scenes will involve 15.000 men. I wonder whether he would have settled for digital technology.
