History
Using cards to create an index was the brainchild of 18th century naturalist Carl Linnaeus, who is known as "the father of modern taxonomy" for his work on categorizing species. He needed a system for organizing data that was expandable and able to be rearranged easily, so he kept each datum on individual sheets and could add new sheets and reorganize simply.
Card catalogs as currently known arose in the 19th century, and Melvil Dewey standardized the index cards used in library card catalogs in the 1870s.
In the late 1890s, edge-notched cards were invented, which allowed for easy sorting of data by means of a needle-like tool. These edge-notched cards were phased out in the 1980s in favor of computer databases, and they are no longer sold.
Read more about this topic: Index Card
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgement.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)