Archaic Technology: notched index cards
I love archaic technology. I particularly love archaic computation devices. I've been making a game recently of teaching myself as many of them as possible. I'm fairly handy on an abacus, which is really great at addition and complement subtraction. It is relatively harder to perform multiplication and division on such a device, which led to explore Napier's bones. I'm currently building a set of them out of wood.
I've been spending time as well teaching myself how to use a slide rule. That has been fairly slow going, as the surviving references tend to be elementary or presume you are being guided by an expert. I still have a few aha moments to go before I'll really get them.
As well, I've been spending time brainstorming mechanical retrieval systems. Being able to do math quickly is fine, but not if you don't have a way to organize your work. I've particularly been browsing through books on data structures and asking: "What data structures make sense to someone with no background in computers? What of these have physical analogs that make sense to people--that you could put a physical representation of it in front of them and have them get it? Finally, which of *these* work the same mechanically or electrically?
Things like hash tables are right out. Binary trees don't fair much better. Dictionaries are good candidates, but if you're talking about adding and subtracting pages, they work differently electronically and mechanically. I'm currently exploring directed acyclic graphs (my personal favourite data structure) built out of hemp rope and alphabet beads. I want to use it to track interdependent projects that change over time. I've also been brainstorming stack computers built out of washers and a series of metal dowel rods. The intended use is tracking matrix-like calculations, particularly accounting problems.
I love all of these things. I can take contemporary notions of computation--particularly I can take a computational approach to solving problems, but do so with tools from a previous era. Our ideas and the tools we use to express them are often so intertwined that we lose sight of the problem we're working on. It is much easier to solve problems a tool is designed to solve, whether that is the problem we're having or not.
Changing the tool is a great way to see how your problem(s) change with it, and through that development much simpler problems. It lets you see how much stuff you thought was essential to your problem is actually noise.
I recently came across notched index cards, a system for retrieving information using boolean logic. Better yet, it allows for searches on unsorted data. I had previously written off that problem as too complex for meatspace. Which limited me to picking one way to sort something and living with it.
With these, you can "tag" cards with multiple symbols, throw them all in a pile, and then retrieve all cards with a particular tag. When you're done, they go back in the pile in any order you'd like. It is a really great system for keeping brainstorming notes that haven't congealed into clear categories.
Or if you're just looking to have fun, you could use these to organize information for a role-playing game.
squee.