Ideographic Composing Machine

This paper illustrates an application of a holographic memory to the solution of the problem of storing and addressing 10,000 ideographs. The Kanji ideographs are addressed from a keyboard by the stroke sequence used to handwrite the ideographs. The keyboard generated stroke sequence is compared with all legitimate stroke sequences to determine the location of the desired character in an optical memory. The digital word indicating the location of the desired character causes laser strobing of a rotating hologram disk. The output of the disk is read by a vidicon and displayed for operator verification. When verified, the ideograph is photographed to generate the output film of the photocomposing machine.