Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System

Spires (Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System) was written at Stanford University in the late 1970s to be used for a bibliographic database system for Physics. Modified and expanded to be used on a variety of mainframe platforms, it was the program used for the Library Circulation Management database Socrates at most universities in the US from the early 1980s on, and became the primary database management system for Stanford University business and student services in the 1980s and 90s. The primary authors were Dick Guertin and Bill Kiefer.

Spires High Energy Physics database was the first web database in 1991, installed at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC)

Spires currently runs on Unix and Linux and it's primary use is for the world Physics community's High Energy Physics database