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Paper machines : about cards & catalogs, 1548-1929 /
In the twenty-first century, 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 this book, the author traces the evolution of this proto-computer of rearrangeable parts (file cards) that became...
| Clasificación: | Libro Electrónico |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Otros Autores: | |
| Formato: | Electrónico eBook |
| Idioma: | Inglés Alemán |
| Publicado: |
Cambridge, Mass. :
MIT Press,
©2011.
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| Colección: | History and foundations of information science.
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| Temas: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Texto completo |
| Sumario: | In the twenty-first century, 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 this book, the author 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. The author 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 this story, the author 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), 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. -- Adapted from description on publisher's website. |
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| Descripción Física: | 1 online resource (vi, 215 pages) : illustrations |
| Bibliografía: | Includes bibliographical references (pages [181]-205) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780262298216 026229821X 1283343657 9781283343657 0262297272 9780262297271 9786613343659 661334365X |