Can I read Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 (History and Foundations of Information Science) on EtoBox?

Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 (History and Foundations of Information Science) by Markus Krajewski; Peter Krapp is a book available to read on EtoBox.

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

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 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

Author

Markus Krajewski; Peter Krapp

Publisher

The MIT Press

Published

2002

Language

EN

ISBN

9781283343657

Subjects

History, Science, Computer Science