Paper machines : about cards & catalogs, 1548-1929 / Markus Krajewski ; translated by Peter Krapp.
2011
Z693.3.C37 K7313 2011eb
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Title
Paper machines : about cards & catalogs, 1548-1929 / Markus Krajewski ; translated by Peter Krapp.
Uniform Title
Zettelwirtschaft. English
ISBN
9780262298216 (electronic bk.)
026229821X (electronic bk.)
1283343657
9781283343657
9780262015899
0262015897
026229821X (electronic bk.)
1283343657
9781283343657
9780262015899
0262015897
Publication Details
Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2011.
Language
English
Description
1 online resource (vi, 215 pages) : illustrations.
Item Number
9786613343659
Call Number
Z693.3.C37 K7313 2011eb
Dewey Decimal Classification
025.3/109
Summary
"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.
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OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
Added Author
Krapp, Peter, translator.
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