An interesting historical piece at the information architecture site Boxes and Arrows on Paul Otlet's 1934 plans for a mechanical database built with index cards.
... Paul Otlet envisioned a new kind of scholar’s workstation: a moving desk shaped like a wheel, powered by a network of hinged spokes beneath a series of moving surfaces. The machine would let users search, read and write their way through a vast mechanical database stored on millions of 3x5 index cards.
This new research environment would do more than just let users retrieve documents; it would also let them annotate the relationships between one another, “the connections each [document] has with all other [documents], forming from them what might be called the Universal Book.”
[via 43 Folders]
Posted by johndanseven at September 21, 2005 02:47 PM