3 ms·

I wonder how futuristic that looked to the people at the time

dredmorbius 4y ago
It was quite literally the pinacle of data storage and management. There's a whole host of advances that were made from, say, 1800 -- 1950, which we mostly gloss over. The technologies seem obvious today, but were considerable: - Iron, and later steel, replacing wood, in printing presses. - Steam and later electricity, replacing human power, in printing presses. - Roller, and later web, paper transport rather than a platten and screw press. - Much cheaper paper manufacture. With concommitant problems of acid pulp paper disintegrating over time. (The late 19th century Librarian of Congress reports have extensive appendices on paper manufacture and technology: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015036735036&view=2up&seq=74&skin=2021&size=125 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015036735036&vi... - Index cards. As of the 1880s, the US Library of Congress printed its catalogue as a set of bound volumes (distributed, among other locations, to customs offices at ports to check for imported contraband pirated books). This proved increasingly nonfeasible as the collection grews. - Loose-leaf bindings. The whole notion of a codex-arranged book to which pages could be added or removed was a novelty. The convenience of a book, the manageability of a card catalogue. You'll find numerous loose-leaf mechanisms in late 19th / early 20th century stationers' catologues and patent filings. - Standardised business correspondence. As information technology has improved, the personal and flowery nature of writing has eroded. "Telegraphic" writing emerged with that device. Printers and publishers such as Twain and Franklin had a physical feel for words set in type, as well as cliche and stereotype (literal physical blocks of unchanging text). Massive departmental enterprises with either geographically-diverse (railroads, telegraph companies) or technically complex (chemical and refining operations) required management of procedures and information flows out of necessity. - Punch cards would have been another alternative to the Czech archive shown here, though cards would have had limited capacity (80 bytes/card), with limited human readability. Compressed data formats originating on cards gave us the Y2K problem. At about the time the Central Social Institution was opened, advances in photography, microphotography and microforms were underway. This was also the period in which the US Library of Congress Classification was being developed, a history I'm exploring myself presently.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  And since I didn't clearly note the impacts of printing-press changes: In 1800, on a wooden press little changed from that Gutenberg had first used based on a wine press, a team of pressmen could produce about 120 printed sheets per hour. Those were often either folio (two pages per sheet) or quarto, but would have been one side only -- the versos were printed after allowing the first sides to dry overnight. Iron and steel presses improved efficiency and strenth of the presses, and roughly doubled output. Powered and rotary presses sped things up further, and by 1900, an electrically-powered offset-lithographic web press could generate one million pages per hour, a performance increase of about 10,000 fold. At the same time, the cost of paper, especially cheap pulp newsprint (though also other grades) fell through advances in the papermaking trade itself. The volume of printed material exploded. A webserver is effectively a printing press of sorts, streaming bits out over a wire to be reassembled in your browser screen. By 2016, a single webserver with 8 CPU cores could deliver over 1.6 million requests per second. https://www.rootusers.com/linux-web-server-performance-benchmark-2016-results/ https://www.rootusers.com/linux-web-server-performance-bench...

It was quite literally the pinacle of data storage and management. There's a whole host of advances that were made from, say, 1800 -- 1950, which we mostly gloss over. The technologies seem obvious today, but were considerable: - Iron, and later steel, replacing wood, in printing presses. - Steam and later electricity, replacing human power, in printing presses. - Roller, and later web, paper transport rather than a platten and screw press. - Much cheaper paper manufacture. With concommitant problems of acid pulp paper disintegrating over time. (The late 19th century Librarian of Congress reports have extensive appendices on paper manufacture and technology: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015036735036&view=2up&seq=74&skin=2021&size=125 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015036735036&vi... - Index cards. As of the 1880s, the US Library of Congress printed its catalogue as a set of bound volumes (distributed, among other locations, to customs offices at ports to check for imported contraband pirated books). This proved increasingly nonfeasible as the collection grews. - Loose-leaf bindings. The whole notion of a codex-arranged book to which pages could be added or removed was a novelty. The convenience of a book, the manageability of a card catalogue. You'll find numerous loose-leaf mechanisms in late 19th / early 20th century stationers' catologues and patent filings. - Standardised business correspondence. As information technology has improved, the personal and flowery nature of writing has eroded. "Telegraphic" writing emerged with that device. Printers and publishers such as Twain and Franklin had a physical feel for words set in type, as well as cliche and stereotype (literal physical blocks of unchanging text). Massive departmental enterprises with either geographically-diverse (railroads, telegraph companies) or technically complex (chemical and refining operations) required management of procedures and information flows out of necessity. - Punch cards would have been another alternative to the Czech archive shown here, though cards would have had limited capacity (80 bytes/card), with limited human readability. Compressed data formats originating on cards gave us the Y2K problem. At about the time the Central Social Institution was opened, advances in photography, microphotography and microforms were underway. This was also the period in which the US Library of Congress Classification was being developed, a history I'm exploring myself presently.

dredmorbius 4y ago
And since I didn't clearly note the impacts of printing-press changes: In 1800, on a wooden press little changed from that Gutenberg had first used based on a wine press, a team of pressmen could produce about 120 printed sheets per hour. Those were often either folio (two pages per sheet) or quarto, but would have been one side only -- the versos were printed after allowing the first sides to dry overnight. Iron and steel presses improved efficiency and strenth of the presses, and roughly doubled output. Powered and rotary presses sped things up further, and by 1900, an electrically-powered offset-lithographic web press could generate one million pages per hour, a performance increase of about 10,000 fold. At the same time, the cost of paper, especially cheap pulp newsprint (though also other grades) fell through advances in the papermaking trade itself. The volume of printed material exploded. A webserver is effectively a printing press of sorts, streaming bits out over a wire to be reassembled in your browser screen. By 2016, a single webserver with 8 CPU cores could deliver over 1.6 million requests per second. https://www.rootusers.com/linux-web-server-performance-benchmark-2016-results/ https://www.rootusers.com/linux-web-server-performance-bench...