Computers Made of Paper, Genders Made of Cards

In 1969, Marshall McLuhan published a deck of cards, meant to be used for problem solving. His Distant Early Warning Line Card Deck (DEW deck) referenced the chain of sixty-three Cold War Arctic radar stations built by the Canadian and US governments across Inuit land between 1952 and 1957. That McLuhan created and published this card deck suggests more than a passing interest in paper cards as a way of designing an information system. For McLuhan, cards formalized a mediated relationship to information. As they were encoded, shuffled, and categorized by hand, index cards provided users with tactile experiences of information as an object to be systematized and managed.
This chapter analyzes how a selection of instructional articles and manuals on indexing with paper cards from this period explained new computing processes to readers. These texts drew on cultural understandings of women’s craft and aptitude for domestic organization in order to frame computers as tactile, approachable tools, ready for use by amateurs. I focus on a prefabricated device called the Knitting Needle Computer, which re-purposed computer punch cards for manual, hobbyist indexing, and was designed to sort cards with knitting needles. Through devices like this one, gendered labour and gendered experiences with paper cards underwrote midcentury efforts to ease information saturated publics into the ideas and practices of computing.