Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 by Markus Krajewski, translated by Peter Krapp.
From the webpage:
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.
Before ordering a copy, you may want to read Alistair Black’s review. Despite an overall positive impression, Alistair records:
Be warned, Paper Machines is not an easy read. It is not just that in some sections the narrative jumps around, points already firmly made are needlessly repeated, the characters in the plot are not always introduced carefully enough, and a great deal seems to have been lost in translation. More serious than these difficulties, the book is written entirely in the present tense. This is both disconcerting and distracting. I’m surprised the editorial team (the book is part of a monograph series titled “History and Foundations of Information Science”) and a publisher as reputable as the MIT Press allowed this to happen; unless, that is, the original German version was itself written in the present tense, which for a historical discourse I would find baffling.
Alistair does conclude:
My final advice with respect to this book: it is a good addition to the emerging field of information history and the reader should persevere with it, despite its deficiencies in narrative style. The excellent illustrations will help in this regard.
Taking Alistair’s comments at face value, I would have to agree that correction of them would make the book an easier read.
On the other hand, working through Paper Machines and perhaps developing references in addition to those given, will give many hours of delight.