The Pre-Digital Art of Crafting Notes

To the Editor:

In “Noted” (The Chronicle Review, January 11), Geoffrey Nunberg has a section on “Digital Note-Taking Systems” without recognizing that these need not be electronic.

When I was a grad student at Columbia in the pre-laptop 1960s, I built myself such a system out of a wooden box, a wire hanger, and a stack of 8x10 index cards. (I can’t remember where I got the idea, but it was certainly not original.) Using a multiple hole puncher, I put a row of about 20 holes along the wide edge of the cards. Each hole corresponded to a single search term. On the front and back top edges of the box, I filed 20 notches corresponding to the holes in the cards. From a wire hanger, I cut a straight rod that could run from the front to the back of the box, fitting into any pair of the notches. If I put the stack of cards in the box with the holes lined up with the notches, I could thread the rod through any of the holes and pick the entire stack out of the box.

After taking notes on some hundreds of these cards, I entered the appropriate terms on each card by cutting the corresponding holes out to the top of the card. Each note could thus be categorized by one or more of 20 search terms. When the rod was threaded through notch and hole No. 14, for example, and the stack lifted, any cards that had been cut out at hole No. 14 would remain in the box. If a card had more than one hole, the procedure could be repeated at another number, and the remaining cards would have been refined a step further.

One day I brought the contraption to a seminar. Ted Tayler, the education professor, looked at it and said, “I’ve known people who had to sharpen a whole box of pencils before sitting down to work, but you beat them all.”

Eventually I did finish the dissertation; sadly I didn’t think to preserve my homemade difference engine.

David Greenstein
Director
Continuing Education and Public Programs
Cooper Union
New York