Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 (History and Foundations of Information Science)

by Markus Krajewski

Peter Krapp (Translator)

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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...

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  • ISBN10 0262015897
  • ISBN13 9780262015899
  • Publish Date 19 August 2011
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country US
  • Publisher MIT Press
  • Imprint The MIT Press