TY  - GEN
N2  - "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."--Publisher's website.
AB  - "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."--Publisher's website.
T1  - Paper machines :about cards & catalogs, 1548-1929 /
DA  - 2011.
CY  - Cambridge, Mass. :
AU  - Krajewski, Markus,
AU  - Krapp, Peter,
CN  - ProQuest Ebook Central Academic Complete
CN  - Z693.3.C37
PB  - MIT Press,
PP  - Cambridge, Mass. :
PY  - 2011.
ID  - 1404232
KW  - Catalog cards
KW  - Card catalogs
KW  - Information organization
KW  - INFORMATION SCIENCE/General
KW  - SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY/History of Technology
KW  - INFORMATION SCIENCE/Library Science
SN  - 9780262298216
SN  - 026229821X
SN  - 1283343657
SN  - 9781283343657
TI  - Paper machines :about cards & catalogs, 1548-1929 /
LK  - https://univsouthin.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usiricelib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3339342
LK  - http://www.oclc.org/content/dam/oclc/forms/terms/vbrl-201703.pdf
UR  - https://univsouthin.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usiricelib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3339342
UR  - http://www.oclc.org/content/dam/oclc/forms/terms/vbrl-201703.pdf
ER  -