Paper Machines About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929

by Krajewski, Markus; Krapp, Peter

• ISBN13: 9780262015899
• ISBN10: 0262015897
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-08-19
• Publisher: The MIT Press

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.

Author Biography

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)

Table of Contents

From Library Guides to the Bureaucratic Era: An Introduction	p. 1
Temporary Indexing	p. 9
Around 1800	p. 25
The First Card Index?	p. 27
Addressing Ideas	p. 27
Data Streams	p. 32
Copy Error: The Josephinian Card Index	p. 34
Floods	p. 35
Canals	p. 37
The Algorithm	p. 38
Error: Buffer Overflow	p. 42
Paper Flow: Taming, Duration	p. 43
Revolution on Playing Cards	p. 45
Thinking in Boxes	p. 49
The Scholar's Machine	p. 50
Genealogy: Johann Jacob Moser and Jean Paul	p. 53
Elsewhere	p. 56
Banknotes	p. 58
Balance Sheet	p. 62
In Praise of the Cross-Reference	p. 63
On the Gradual Manufacturing of Thoughts in Storage	p. 65
American Arrival	p. 69
Do Not Disturb	p. 69
Early Fruits and Dissemination	p. 78
Around 1900	p. 85
Institutional Technology Transfer	p. 87
Reformation: Dewey's Three Blessings for America	p. 87
Transfer; Library Bureau	p. 90
Library Supplies	p. 90
Standardization	p. 91
Corporate Genealogy	p. 92
The Transfer	p. 95
Product / System / Manufacturing	p. 100
Digression: Foreign Laurels	p. 102
Industry Strategy	p. 104
Transatlantic Technology Transfer	p. 107
Supplying Library Supplies	p. 108
The Library Ge-stell	p. 108
Punch Card	p. 110
The Bridge Enters the Office: World Brain	p. 113
Paper Slip Economy	p. 123
System/Organization	p. 125
Universal / Card / Machine	p. 127
Invalidation	p. 131
The War of the Cards: Copyrighting the "Card Index"™	p. 133
Depiction / Decision	p. 135
Summary: Order / Cleanup	p. 139
Afterword to the English Edition	p. 143
Notes	p. 145
References	p. 181
Index	p. 207
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