Paper Machines ─ About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929

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, asixteenth-century Swiss polymath who described a new method of processing data: to cut up a sheet ofhandwritten notes into slips of paper, with one fact or topic per slip, and arrange as desired. Inthe late eighteenth century, the card catalog became the librarian's answer to the threat ofinformation overload. Then, at the turn of the twentieth century, business adopted the technology ofthe card catalog as a bookkeeping tool. Krajewski explores this conceptual development and casts thecard file as a "universal paper machine" that accomplishes the basic operations ofTuring's universal discrete machine: storing, processing, and transferring data. In telling hisstory, Krajewski takes the reader on a number of illuminating detours, telling us, for example, thatthe 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; andthat Melvil Dewey (originator of the Dewey Decimal System) helped bring about the technologytransfer of card files to business.

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.