Articles liés à Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929

Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 - Couverture rigide

Krajewski, Markus

 
9780262015899: Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929
Couverture rigide
ISBN 10 : 0262015897 ISBN 13 : 9780262015899
Editeur : The MIT Press, 2011

Synopsis

Why the card catalog—a “paper machine” with rearrangeable elements—can be regarded as a precursor of the computer.

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.

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À propos de l'auteur

Markus Krajewski is Associate Professor of Media History at the Bauhaus University, Weimar. He is a developer of the bibliographic software Synapsen: A Hypertextual Card Index (www.verzetteln.de/synapsen)

Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

Éditeur
The MIT Press
Date d'édition
2011
Langue
anglais
ISBN 10 
0262015897
ISBN 13 
9780262015899
Reliure
Relié
Nombre de pages
224
Coordonnées du fabricant
non disponible
Personne responsable
non disponible