Name: Paper machines
ISBN: 9781283343657

Paper machines

"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.

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lioetersOct 2023

Your comment made me imagine a "card" catalog where each card is some kind of wireless transparent display or e-ink screen. It would provide a tacticle, physical representation of data that one could flip through to navigate the information space. It would be costly, and probably not practical or useful at all, haha.

Speaking of card catalogs, every time this topic comes up, it reminds me of a book I really enjoyed about index cards.

> Why the card catalog—a “paper machine” with rearrangeable elements—can be regarded as a precursor of the computer.

Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs, 1548-1929 - https://web.archive.org/web/20220531211447/https://mitpress....

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lioetersAug 2021

Related & recommended:

Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 By Markus Krajewski

> Why the card catalog — a “paper machine” with rearrangeable elements — can be regarded as a precursor of the computer.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/paper-machines

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lioetersApr 2018

Since no one has mentioned it yet, this is a wonderful book on the evolution of index cards:

Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548 – 1929 (History and Foundations of Information Science) (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/paper-machines)

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GarnetFlorideJan 2026

Warning: opening a can of worms. Ann Blair is a great source on general, but there are so many facets to this topic here's a list that I have read or am going to read.

* The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen * The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin * Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age by Ann M. Blair * Communicating with Slip Boxes: An Empirical Account by Niklas Luhmann * Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design * Writing the Laboratory Notebook by Howard M Kanare * Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs by Markus Krajewski * A System for Writing by Bob Doto * Building a Second Brain By Tiago Forte * Index, a History of the by Dennis Duncan * Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe by Alberto Cevolini * The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information by Craig Robertson * How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens * Filing and Database Systems by Jeffrey Robert Stewart, Judith A. Scharle, Judith Scharle Greene * Organizing from the Inside Out by Julie Morgenstern * The Library: A Fragile History by Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen * The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul * Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention by Johann Hari * Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World by Irene Vallejo * Filing by Jeffrey Robert Stewart, Judith A. Scharle * How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information by Jillian M. Hess * A Writer's Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham * The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll * The Medieval Scriptorium by Sara J. Charles * Chance Particulars by Sara Mansfield Taber, Maud Taber-Thomas * The Great Mental Models Volume 1- General Thinking Concepts by Parrish, Shane; Beaubien, Rhiannon * The Product is Docs by Christopher Gales * Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott P. Scheper Articulating design decisions by Tom Greever The Card System at the Office by J Kaiser * Systematic Indexing by J Kaiser * Commonplace Books and the Teaching of Style by Lynee Lewis Gaillet * Magic and hypersystems : constructing the information-sharing library by Harold Billings. * The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information by George A. Miller * The Commonplace Book by Elizabeth Smither * The Oxford Handbook of Expertise * Trees, maps, and theorems: Effective communication for rational minds by Jean-luc Doumont * Applied Secretarial Practice by Rupert P. Sorelle and John Robert Gregg * The Card Catalog by Carla Hayden * What is a Document by Michael Buckland * The Commonplace Book by Ann Blair * Make Better Documents by Anil Dash * A Core Calculus for Documents by Will Crichton and Shriram Krishnamurthi * The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams * Information by Anthony Grafton * The Card Catalog by Carla Hayden * Files: Law and Media Technology by Cornelia Vismann * Living Documentation: Continuous Knowledge by Cyrille Martraire * Living in Information by Jorge Arango * How to Write a Technical Paper: Structure and Style of the Epitome of your Research† by Georgios Varsamopoulos * Information Development: Managing Your Documentation Projects, Portfolio, and People by JoAnn T. Hackos * Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, Jorge Arango * Software Technical Writing: A Guidebook by James (jamesg.blog)

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GarnetFlorideJan 2026

Yeah, this subject is a bit of a rabbit hole. I've read about half of the so far. That's my list of sources from those that I have so far.

I would say start with:

* The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen (This is a fast micro history that hits the highlights.)

* Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age by Ann M. Blair (She is a scholar that has a lot on the subject.)

* Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe by Alberto Cevolini (This is a collection of pretty deep essays.)

* Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs by Markus Krajewski (This is about the development of paper-based databases.)

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kkfxApr 2022

Thanks :-)

I'll add Cataloging the World, by Alex Wright and Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 by Markus Krajewski plus few relatively recent articles:

- Note Taking as an Art of Transmission http://doi.org/10.1086/427303

- From Note-Taking to Data Banks https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2010.492615

- Facing Interfaces: Paul Otlet's Visualizations of Data Integration https://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/images/e/e2/Heuvel_Rayward_F...

There are surely many others and following those we arrive to classic PIM publications, witch is "the system to organize personal digital information" in the end!

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