Our Google

SEMO card catalog for Sagamore c 1966I ran across a box of poorly fixed and fading pictures that I must have taken for The Sagamore.

Here a student is using the wireless research application we had available to us at Kent Library. It had a lot of advantages: it didn’t require batteries, power, expensive hubs and routers, rewiring the building, and it never froze up and needed to be rebooted.

In the interest of full disclosure, on a cold day, the USER might be frozen (see below), and, if they made excessive noise, Dr. Snider might boot them from the learning facility.

Exercise a side benefit

  • You had to trudge to the library through slush and snow in the winter or broiling heat in the summer, uphill both ways.
  • Once you had determined that there was a reference material you needed, you had to prowl the stacks hoping that nobody had checked the book out before you got to it.
  • If you were lucky enough to find it, then you’d have to carry a mountain of books back home (up the hill) to do your work.
  • When done, you’d have to haul the materials back.

3 Replies to “Our Google”

  1. I worked for Roadway Express trucking company for two years in 1973-1975 up in St. Louis. Every freight bill we had, thousands of them, were spread out on flat shelves in numerical order like library cards. If you wanted to google (find) a certain receipt, you made your fingers do the walking because there wasn’t any other way. By the way, we also had to sort them in numerical order to be put in the shelves as they were returned to the terminal. A job like that is the reason I love computers.

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