Washington • In 1964, the novelist Eugene Burdick published “The 480.” The best-selling book described, as Burdick wrote in his preface, “people who work with slide rules and calculating machines and computers which can retain an almost infinite number of bits of information as well as sort, categorize and reproduce this information at the press of a button.”
The title refers to 480 categories of voters, defined by demographic characteristics, created by the Simulmatics Corp., a real company, as a way of targeting appeals to small subgroups. The novel’s drama centers on data manipulation’s role in lifting a dark-horse candidate toward the Republican presidential nomination.