Today on almost every desk in every office sits a computer. Eighty years                  ago, desktops were equipped with a nonelectronic data processing machine: a card                  file. In Paper Machines, Markus Krajewski traces the evolution of this                  proto-computer of rearrangeable parts (file cards) that became ubiquitous in offices                  between the world wars. The story begins with Konrad Gessner, a sixteenth-century                  Swiss polymath who described a new method of processing data: to cut up a sheet of                  handwritten notes into slips of paper, with one fact or topic per slip, and arrange                  as desired. In the late eighteenth century, the card catalog became the librarian's                  answer to the threat of information overload. Then, at the turn of the twentieth                  century, business adopted the technology of the card catalog as a bookkeeping tool.                  Krajewski explores this conceptual development and casts the card file as a                  "universal paper machine" that accomplishes the basic operations of                  Turing's universal discrete machine: storing, processing, and transferring data. In                  telling his story, Krajewski takes the reader on a number of illuminating detours,                  telling us, for example, that the card catalog and the numbered street address                  emerged at the same time in the same city (Vienna), and that Harvard University's                  home-grown cataloging system grew out of a librarian's laziness; and that Melvil                  Dewey (originator of the Dewey Decimal System) helped bring about the technology                  transfer of card files to business.

Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 (History and Foundations of Information Science) PDF

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