Jennifer Davis's List: IS_media

Conventional punched cards and tabulating equipment made individual cases the basic "unit of information storage". Punched cards like the IBM (Hollerith) cards used coded fields for recording different descriptive terms or numerical data. Each card corresponded to an individual database record.    Peek-a-Boo cards reversed the standard procedures by using conceptual categories rather than documents as the unit of information storage. Logically, this "reversed" system corresponds to an (inverted) index == the basis of book indexes, text retrieval systems, library catalogs, and Internet search engines.