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"All fiction is propaganda, and the fiction we like is the propaganda we believe in, and the fiction we don't like is the propaganda we don't believe in."
- Samuel R. Delany
 |
| Auto-Clerk | ||
| An automated accounting system. |
| Some place down in the innards of the auto-clerk who handled the sale for the Gadget Shoppe four holes were punched in a continuous role of paper; the item appeared in the cost accounting of the owner, and was reflected the accounting of the endless chain of middle distributors, transporters, processers, original producers, service companies, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs - world without end. |
| Technovelgy from Beyond This Horizon,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1942 Additional resources -
|
What Heinlein appears to imagine here is an automated system using paper tape that uses holes to indicate information about a sale, and that the facts about the sale would be echoed throughout a supply chain.
The first loom controlled with punched holes in paper tape was created in 1725 by Basile Bouchon. The first to propose punched cards for use in informatics was Semyon Korsakov in 1832. Herman Hollerith invented machine-readable data recording in time for the 1890 census, using his punched cards - Hollerith cards.
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'There was a wall ahead... It was riddled with holes that were the mouths of tunnels.'
'...support the interior human structure against Jupiter’s pull.'
'Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up and placed in a tray...'
'The German chemists have discovered how to supply the needed elements in compact, undiluted form...'
'Compounds devised by the biochemists for the rapid building of bone...'
'The car faltered as the external command came to brake...'
'It is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized...'
