Via Joshua Keating at Foreign Policy, an excerpt from “Some Far-out Thoughts on Computers,” CIA Analyst Orrin Clotworthy’s 1962 memo about the future of Big Data:

“As a final thought, how about a machine that would send via closed-circuit television visual and oral information needed immediately at high-level conferences or briefings? Let’s say that a group of senior officers are contemplating a covert action program for Afghanistan. Things go well until someone asks, ‘Well, just how many schools are there in the country, and what is the literacy rate?’ No one in the room knows. (Remember, this is an imaginary situation.) So the junior member present dials a code number into a device at one end of the table. Thirty seconds later, on the screen overhead, a teletype printer begins to hammer out the required data. Before the meeting is over, the group has been given through the same method the names of countries that have airlines into Afghanistan, a biographical profile of the Soviet ambassador there, and the Pakistani order of battle along the Afghanistan frontier. Neat, no?”