Obsolete but cool!

Most of you know my fascination with history. We are all standing atop an inverted pyramid of technology.

The apex of that pyramid is the sharpened rock. Then the antelope thigh bone. With a simple thigh bone in hand to multiply strength via the lever primitive man is no longer an easy kill for every predator on the Savannah! In fact the tides turned and smart predators leave those clawless, toothless primates alone.

Towards the  top of the pyramid and responsible for a huge surge towards the top is an old invention that changed the world yet many  people have forgotten they even existed!  I think it's time to reflect on that ancient technology if only for a moment and recognize it's genius!

BOOKS!

The acronym stands for Bio-Optical Organized Knowledge Storage.

It was a very cool concept! They wrote (then later printed) knowledge on paper frames and bound the paper stacks together and here is the key, they gave each paper frame an address! Then this is where it gets really cool! Then they used analog indexes (Yes ANALOG!) in both the front and back of BOOKS which contained analog pointers to page frame addresses inside the Knowledge Store so you could randomly access desired data without having to do sequential reads from the file header to the end-of-file marker thus eliminating full data scans resulting in a vast reduction in required I/O for a given data fetch!

It greatest flaw though was it was always a single-threaded process. Latch wait times for multiple BOOKS scans could run into minutes or even hours.

Still, it was absolutely brilliant stuff even if it is deeply obsolete now.

;)