Computing Before Computers (1990) | Hacker News Reader

Computing Before Computers (1990)

ed-thelen.org

40 pointsstellalo13 comments

I've recently been thinking about the various paper-based technologies (not strictly computational) that were used in offices and libraries to store, organize, retrieve, display, and send information before widespread computer usage. E.g., encyclopedias, paper archives, Rolodexes, card catalogs, pneumatic tubes, mechanical calculators, etc.

Can anyone recommend a book or resource on non-computational, paper/mechanical information technologies?

(And sometime I wonder if some catastrophic event - total cyberwarfare, Carrington event - might cause society to reimplement or reinvent some of this older tech. Who knows how much arcane knowledge is locked away in the head of Mildred from Archiving, who retired rather than learn to use a PC?)

It's interesting that these technologies acted as a brake or limiter on the compexities of the businesses/organisations that relied upon them - and this, IMO, was a good thing, as it meant by extension that the entire enterprise was comprehensible to humans.

Contrast with today, where it is trivial to build software that enables - and thereby imposes - hugely complicated processes and rules, as often as not with little or no aggregate benefit.

My go-to example here is WWII, where the western democracies were able to run hugely complicated beaurocracies for, inter alia, logistics and codebreaking, with superlative efficiency using little more than pen and paper (the use of computers in codebreaking being technical rather than administrative or procedural of course). If we found ourselves in a similar situation today there would be stormtroopers marching down Whitehall while our top brass were still in requirements capture workshops.

The irony of resources of this nature is that they're not really available on the internet...

My dad was the office manager for a water company in a small town. In one corner of the office was a card catalog sorted by address. Each card had a little hand-drawn map showing the distance and bearing of the home's shutoff valve. If you didn't pay your bill, someone would pull the card, copy the data off it, show up at your house, take some measurements, and hopefully dig a single hole in your yard, and turn off your service.

A resource that you can see today would be the Bell Systems cabinet of punchcards. Every site would have a couple of these large chest-freezer-sized beasts, filled with a motorized chain of buckets, each filled to the brim with punch cards. Each card held a microfiche of an engineering drawing or technical document.

It is a daunting amount of information, and I haven't delved into the indexing of it, but... I can barely imagine it.

Anyway, you can see one in Seattle's Museum of Communications. After that, head a little bit away to the Living Computer Museum where they have a working punchcard sorter.

Lastly, apropos to this, in games like Bioshock and Dishonored I have mused about the walls and walls of filing cabinets found there. I can't imagine how a bank would function with just ledger books...

If you want to think even deeper, Romans had complex systems of bureaucracy as well yet clearly even less technology.

The card index system; its principles, uses, operation, and component parts

https://archive.org/details/cardindexsystemi00bylerich

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly et al. has some interesting chapters on pre-computer data processing in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Look for library science textboks from before ~1996. We used Organizing Knowledge, 2nd ed., by Jennifer Rowley for my intro to LIS back in the day. I wish I could remember the name of the text for my reference class. Ask any reference librarian, they'll be glad to hook you up.

Libraries are huge machines, consisting of paper and humans and furniture and architecture, for accumulating and processing knowledge and making it available. The reference section is the TTY of the library.

"Word By Word" by Kory Stamper, an editor of the Mirriam-Webster Dictionary, includes a section and conveys a culture around coordinating a team of definition writers from paper citations using intra-office mail/notes and a physical archive.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30781490-word-by-word

A more recent work, reflecting the latest scholarship in the field, is Priestley's "A Science of Operations".

Unfortunately Springer wants 120€ for the ebook version of that title....

Well, this feels bizarre, I'd just started planning out a series of blog posts with that exact title when this pops up on HN's front page.

Guess I'll go back to consuming rather than creating for now as I dive right into this book over the weekend. Maybe I'll write a review of this instead.

Please submit it if you do!

Also, in case it's relevant: rather than covering a list of topics in one go, it's better to focus on one topic at time, starting with the most interesting, and go deep rather than broad. Lists, unfortunately, don't lead to interesting online discussions since attention is diluted across a bunch of disparate things. That's probably why the current submission, despite the general theme being fascinating, didn't do better.

This is great. Looking for to reading the entire book. Thanks for sharing!

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