In 1983, at the dawn of the personal computer age, Apple Inc. in promotional film entitled "Lisa Soul Of A New Machine" touted their new computer, a 16-bit dual disk drive "personal office system", as something that would do away with "the cluttered desk, index cards, file folders, the in-out basket, [and] the calculator." (00:01)

Some of these things moved to the realm of the computer including the messy desk(top) now giving people two messy desks, a real one and a virtual one. The database-like structure of the card index also moved over, but the subjective index and its search power were substituted for a lower level concordance search.

30 years on, for most people, the value of the database idea behind the humble "index card" has long since disappeared and so it seems here as if it's "just" another piece of cluttery paper.

Appreciate the rosy framing of the juxtaposition of "past" and "future" jumping over the idea of the here and now which includes the thing they're selling, the Lisa computer. They're selling the idealized and unclear future even though it's really just today.

Döring, Tanja, and Steffi Beckhaus. “The Card Box at Hand: Exploring the Potentials of a Paper-Based Tangible Interface for Education and Research in Art History.” In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction, 87–90. TEI ’07. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1145/1226969.1226986.

This looks fascinating with respect to note taking and subsequent arranging, outlining, and use of notes in human computer interaction space for creating usable user interfaces.

https://lu.ma/2u5f7ky0

I attended this live this morning from 9:20 - 10:45 AM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines

Reference that discusses calculating machines and information processors.

aliases for "topical headings": headwords keywords tags categories

In order to become a free-standing tool, the card index needed to have self-referential closure.

This may have been one of the necessary steps for the early ideas behind computers. In addition to the idea of a clockwork universe, the index card may have been a step towards early efforts at creating the modern computer.

Edelmann, A., Wolff, T., Montagne, D., & Bail, C. A. (2020). Computational Social Science and Sociology. Annual Review of Sociology, 46(1), annurev-soc-121919-054621. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-121919-054621

pp. 31-32 problems with listserves relative to usenet groups

• more intense (sent messages)
• more user resources (in box full).

p. 28 history of LISTSERV

p. 26 USENET is where newsfeeds came from

pp. 24-25 history of bitnet

Reception of the Mother of All Demos

The story of Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch, whose theory of brain function was followed by John von Neumann's design for the stored program computer.

Excerpt

Long article by Stephen Wolfram on the history of Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage, and his calculating machines.

Emulation and Virtualization as Preservation Strategies, David Rosenthal

The Free Software Foundation's definition of free software, originally expressed by Richard Stallman. It is free as in free speech, not as in free beer. Software offered for a fee can still be free. A program is free software if the users have four essential freedoms:

0. Run the program as you wish, for any purpose.<br> 1. Study the source code, and change it as you please.<br> 2. Copy and distribute the original program.<br> 3. Copy and distribute modified versions.