ABSTRACT
For much of its history, the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) has been a leader in providing the most reliable available technical data to scientific and engineering users. This chapter describes the NBS’s OMNIDATA and the Computerization of Scientific Data, relating the context in which the publication appeared, its impact on science, technology, and the general public, and brief details about the lives and work of the author. An important feature of OMNIDATA was its ability to convert data files from other formats for use in the OMNIDATA system and to generate data arrays that could be accessible to other programs written in languages including FORTRAN, COBOL, and XBASIC. The use of OMNIDATA quickly spread to other parts of NBS, beyond the Standard Reference Data Program, so much so that there were continuing problems in providing support and extensions for a diverse group of users.
