Read e-book online Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 (History PDF

By Markus Krajewski,Peter Krapp

Today on virtually each table in each place of work sits a working laptop or computer. 80 years in the past, pcs have been outfitted with a nonelectronic information processing computer: a card dossier. In Paper Machines, Markus Krajewski strains the evolution of this proto-computer of rearrangeable components (file playing cards) that turned ubiquitous in workplaces among the area wars. the tale starts with Konrad Gessner, a sixteenth-century Swiss polymath who defined a brand new approach to processing facts: to chop up a sheet of handwritten notes into slips of paper, with one truth or subject in keeping with slip, and set up as wanted. within the past due eighteenth century, the cardboard catalog grew to become the librarian's resolution to the specter of info overload. Then, on the flip of the 20th century, company followed the know-how of the cardboard catalog as a bookkeeping software. Krajewski explores this conceptual improvement and casts the cardboard dossier as a "universal paper computing device" that accomplishes the fundamental operations of Turing's common discrete computer: storing, processing, and moving facts. In telling his tale, Krajewski takes the reader on a few illuminating detours, telling us, for instance, that the cardboard catalog and the numbered road tackle emerged even as within the comparable urban (Vienna), and that Harvard University's home-grown cataloging process grew out of a librarian's laziness; and that Melvil Dewey (originator of the Dewey Decimal approach) helped lead to the know-how move of card documents to business.

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Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 (History and Foundations of Information Science) by Markus Krajewski,Peter Krapp


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