Question asked by somebody on substack, aka Onlyfans For Books: We have lots of new categories in books. Have librarians been updating Dewey and LC to keep track?
Easy answer: We don’t have new categories. Cybernetics isn’t new at all. Academic journals and popular scientific books have been discussing it in detail since the 1930s. I don’t remember the exact LC combo, but I remember browsing through college libraries in the 80s, knowing where to look for various subtopics. Many of the books and journals, especially Russian, were from the 40s.
The only truly new aspect is copyright theft. Before 2020 nobody IMAGINED or PROPOSED abolishing all laws on theft and forgery. Nobody imagined that the biggest stocks in the Dow would be FORGERS**.
Better question: Code libraries are also old, developed in the 1950s as physical libraries of printouts and punch cards inside companies like IBM and DEC, then digitalized as sets of subroutines ready for inclusion in a compiled executable.
I wrote about physical code libraries a few months ago, literally drawing the metaphor of book libraries. At that time I didn’t think about categories.
Why didn’t IBM establish a universal indexing scheme for code libraries? (Or if they did, why did it disappear?)
In LC form, first letter for main purposes like accounting, education, military, weather forecasting, engineering, pharma, images, language processing. Second letter for main subtopic, then numbers for further detail. A code LC would streamline the work of programmers and compilers. Instead of looking through the available modules and include files to see if the function you want is here, you’d just specify #include RM1041; and you’d know the function you need is in this set, whether it’s C or Python or Fortran or whatever.
At the broadest level, computers are classifiers, not calculators. Hollerith invented his machine in 1890 to classify census data, and classifying is still the primary work of programs. Math is an optional accessory. Why wasn’t this main skill used to help with the details of computing?
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I’m always aware of the long history of computing, algorithms and data webs. I’ve made dozens of tech history pieces exploring the history and emphasizing that our “new innovations” are permanent parts of all such systems. This blog could be titled No, it’s not new.
Here’s a not new I hadn’t noticed before!
This 1977 IBM movie introduces the concept of software to the public using player pianos as a metaphor. Along the way they mention that developers visited software libraries to examine samples of existing code. The film doesn’t show us the libraries. For sure they weren’t public buildings!
They must have resembled the record library of a radio station: a large room of carefully catalogued tapes and card decks.
The modern equivalent is Libraries in C and Modules in Python, purely in software and generally part of the compiler package. There’s one big difference. We don’t just examine the library code to see if we can learn a useful trick; we directly incorporate it in our own compilation, more like editing a mixtape or an anthology.
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** Footnote: Well, this kind of forging. In previous eras US Steel and GM were on top of the Dow for the honest kind of forging.
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