It’s hard to imagine a world without tabs, they are absolutely everywhere. They come in all sizes and forms: divider, suspension file tabs, index card tabs and in the realm of computing. Think of Excel without tabs – ah wait a minute that was Lotus 1-2-3. But not that long ago, just over one hundred years ago in fact, there were no tabs.
Image: Flickr User – Takashi [^]
Technology Review has an article on the history of the humble tab:
And whether our tabs are cardboard extensions or digital projections, they all date to an invention little more than a hundred years old. The original tab signaled an information storage revolution and helped enable everything from management consulting to electronic data processing. technologyreview.com [^]
The index card, a product of the French Revolution, gave the world a “randomly accessible, infinitely modifiable arrangement of data”. But it took the tab to make the index cards truly manageable! Although the index cards was invented by the French it was an American, James Newton Gunn, who invented the tab almost one hundred years later in the 1890’s. In 1897 Gunn was awarded a US patent for his invention, by which time he was working for the Library Bureau a company founded by Melvill Dewey, the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System.
It would be easy to understate the importance of the tab and the small part that it has played in the information revolution. Massive changes in society all come from small steps forward, the tab is one those steps – thank-you Mr Gunn.
Sources: technologyreview.com [^], 43folders.com [^], and wikipedia.org [^]
Wall-E – Copyright Criminal?
There is some interesting discussion about whether or not the ‘loveable’ Wall-E robot is a copyright criminal over at SFFaudio [^]. The link does have mild spoilers, but probably nothing that you wouldn’t have guessed at from seeing the trailer.
The case that Jesse Willis at SFFaudio make centres around the robot’s “jailbreaking” of a copy of the film “Hello Dolly”. As they point out, in the year 2805 the film would be almost 800 years out of copyright protection and in the public domain. But under the USA’s DMCA [^] and Canada’s about to be enacted copyright law circumventing copy protection is a crime. So even though the 1969 film would be in the public domain, if the original media was protected by some form of Digital Rights Management [^], which video tapes and DVDs are, copying it onto another device would be a crime. Another case of hypocrisy in this film? Consumerism is bad, but buy our toys [BrizBunny Comments]; and don’t copy our robot, buy an original DVD of this movie.
Despite this we here in the CannibalRabbit household are still looking forward to the movie.