'feedback'

[Joseph Salmons]

A friend asked about the history of recent meanings of 'feedback'. OED has the technical meaning from the 1920s and meanings from the 1960s and 1970s that are getting close, notably a 1971 quote "We began to get a fairly good feedback from most people who know about it and it looked as though the concerts would be good scenes". (Note the indefinite article, which is utterly ungrammatical for me at least.) And I didn't see anything in the ADS-L archives. From culturomics.org (http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+feedback%2C+feedback&year_start=1930&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3), it looks like it's had a pretty steady overall rise in usage.

Does anybody know the chronology of the semantic development here, or other bits of the history?

Thanks,
Joe

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