So this is part three of our analysis archeological dig into things we take for granted. As I like to say at the beginning of each of these videos, I recommend you view this set of videos in order. Because they do build on each other however they can be viewed independently. Another artifact I found on the dig was a paper book. Now I have to say this archeological dig was not easy. I've actually written a number of books myself both paper and electronic.
By the way, ebooks now outsell paper books about they said clay tablets and Papyrus wouldn't go out of sound as well. One of the oldest records that Papyrus is in the British Museum is dated 2500 BC. Over time, paper became cheap and self publishing became easy. Today anyone can publish a book. My first self published book was a system development methodology. I would order thousands of these to sell and handout at my on site seminars.
Even Microsoft handed this one out as part of a promotion for a release of its software packaged Microsoft Project. Now when I first ordered these, the printer asked where I wanted the blank pages, I said I didn't want any blank pages. However, they explained they use the 16 page paper signature print. Unless my book page count was an exact multiple of 16. There would be blank pages, and it was not cost effective to remove the extra pages. You'll find a lot of paper books have blank pages.
As I did this archeological dig into paper signatures. I found that in the late 1600s, the Dutch invented the two sheet 17 inch paper mold. I also found out that a paper Batman, a person working with paper pulp producing large sheets had an arm stretch of about 44 inches. So a sheet this big was created and then divided to form a sheet eight and a half by 11 inches, the eight and a half being half of the 17 inch Paper mold and the 11 being a quarter of the 44 inch Batman stretch. In the United States you'll find divisions of these dimensions showing up such as when you order a large photograph, they may ask if you want an 11 by 17 in size. This paper sizing was officially accepted in 1920 by the US Bureau of Standards to reduce waste caused by a non standard paper size.
Of course, the sizes are slightly different in the metric system, eight and a half by 11 inch paper is in common use today. But there are other sizes which can cause small problems, such as when we need to file a legal size paper of eight and a half by 14 inches into a standard letterhead, paper folder or file drawer. So we perpetuated papayas and Batman's own stretch again, be careful what you perpetuate. Another artifact found on the day was an electronic or digital book didn't take much digging. I have a few of my books published as electronic or digital books. They are available as Kindle e books.
An e book isn't a physical book of course, even though we use the word book, and it has pages, it even requires electricity to read it. You can ask how thick an E book is, you can ask how many pages it has. But even then a page is relative to the size of text you want to display, and the screen size. It's a virtual page now, so I guess all ebooks are the same thickness. When I converted my manuscripts to kindle format, they told me to eliminate page numbers. Most har returns, for example, using the Enter key or necessarily at the end of the sentence, and all page headers and footers, as well as a mess of other things.
It took me days to convert one of my book files from Microsoft Word, which automatically put a bunch of stuff in behind the scenes than I did Nashville. ebooks, however, still keep the basic design of a book having pages. As I said at the beginning of this set of videos, I've been warped by my years of teaching and our So my analysis brain asks why keep the concept to the page when going digital is like making all digital clocks circular, because we're used to reading clockwise was clockwise on a digital clock anyway, it seems to me that that is doing the equivalent of putting the image of a blank cheque or paper form on the screen for the customer to work with, instead of getting rid of this unnecessary old design aspect of the last implementation. I try not to do this when talking about analysis, but then we think about a possible design for an ebook reader.
If the requirement is to present a story or article, etc, with text for the customer to read in a linear manner, then why not a continuous one line display, we would still want to support the logical constructs of a word, a sentence or paragraph in a chapter. However, we would not need pages words to be hyphenated across two lines to constantly track down from the next line while reading and of course, no need to turn pages, the reading device could have a way to alter the speed of the single line as it moves across the display, and a way to skip to the next sentence paragraphs or chapter. However, no page turn or scroll of a page. That's the leftover from the Papyrus and a Batman's arm stretch. I do recognize, though, that the manufacturer of a new device may want to acknowledge the familiarity of the old design to the customer.
Okay, I'll try not to go into new design mode. Again, it messes with my analysis thinking, but hopefully I made my point. We will probably perpetuate the concept of the page for a while, so I'm not holding my breath. And of course, it's only a small problem for the customer. The reader, the person who is used to the concept of pages probably won't question the need to turn a page on enable. But still the lesson is be careful what you perpetuate.
On the subject of reading devices and data representation. For my archeological dig, I found an 80 column punch card. If you've ever seen one of these They will use to enter data into the early computers using a punch card reader device. cards with holes were used in looms in the 1800s to control the design in material and also for representing music organs. For those cards then like the one shown here, punch cards like this one we used as a data entry medium in the late 1800s. The holes on the punch card we used to represent numbers, letters, etc.
Each column on the card was interpreted as a card pass through a card reader. The example here shows how the numbers zero through nine were represented with a single hole. Then the next three sets of two hole combinations represented the 26 letters of the alphabet. Notice the first two letter sets use the one through nine rows, but the third set uses the two through nine rows making a 26 letter the alphabet. In the late 1800s. Herman Hollerith introduced a punch card tabulating machine, which was used by many large organizations.
Hollerith computing tabulating recording company was later renamed International Business Machines Corporation, IBM, the company where I started my first job, I actually had some of the old punch card readers still lying around. I remember all the payroll information for an employee at that company had to fit into an 80 column car. Obviously, space was so limited, that we would use payroll codes instead of long standard descriptions, and do strange space saving things like Miss off the first two digits of the year and a date. Employee birthdate. For example, we're obviously within the 1900 time period, we had no employees born in the 1800s, so the last two digits sufficed. This wasn't a problem.
As everyone figured future system developers wouldn't perpetuate the punch card limit of a two digit year in new systems into the year 2000. That would be silly. The 80 column card input output device was replaced by the cathode ray tube CRT terminals. Now guess how many columns were on a CRT screen? Yep, ad. So the ad column card led to an 80 column screen on the old IBM 3270 terminals.
That idea of saving a couple of characters on an 80 column card resulted in a bunch of very costly system projects. The y2k problem appeared to be a non event unless you were in the Information Systems world where you got to let in the new year at the office. The good news is punch cards are now obsolete, except maybe in collections. But still the lesson is, be careful what you perpetuate. Follow me on to my next video in this series, Part Four. To continue our archaeological dig.
We'll look at accounting methods human and computer filing tools and how they've evolved into today's systems. Or you can find out more by what I teach professionally by going to my website at www logical conclusions, Inc. Calm