Commentary

Paper      

  P1     

   

I am writing in smaller handwriting now because  paper is expensive. 

Vaslav Nijinsky 1919
The (Cahiers ) Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky.

 

She loved the feel of the paper

the skins of words held in her hands.
There she drank the musty library breath familiar as Freud’s dying lilies,
Baudelaire’s sour wine spilled over the yellow faded pages of Jefferson and Marx. 
Bronte’s smoldering ash wafted with Shakespeare’s sweaty velvet 
in her porous eye. 
A forest of parchment left ink impressions on her sky. The skins left their mark in the folds of her flesh. Bound between the fluent but silent, delicate and bombastic conversations of words catching light like sunshine
shimmering in the leaves,
who could tell the computer disc would
slip in not to be touched or held
in the moments cradled in the
bough of a tree.

Paper

5000 BCE Sumerian Cylinder Stones Round disks carved on the perimeter and stacked to form columns
3000 BCE Clay Tablets Cuneiform writing in Asia Minor
2000 BCE Papyrus Scrolls  60 foot long rolled books Egypt, Rome
1200 BCE Bone and Shell Chinese pictograms for divination
100 BCE Parchment Thinly stretched leather books in Europe and Asia Minor
100 BCE  Hemp and Bark Paper Invented Sheets constructed from pulp stretched across molds - China
100 AD First Known Ink Egypt and China
250  Mayan Codex  Pounded bark painted with  feathers brushes
300  Ogham Wooden Staffs  Celtic alphabet of tree characters
500  Runic Wood Tablets  European rune writing
800 Chinese Wood  Block Printing Diamond Sutra oldest print book
1000 Linen Paper Lighter materials developed in Arabic counties 
1450  Gutenberg Movable Type European printing press
1804 Fourdrinier Paper Making Machine Rag paper formed on a continuous sheet of wire cloth by Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier.
1844 Keller Woodpulp Paper Process  Wood sticks pressed against a grindstone with water to create small fibers for making paper, Germany
1855 Phonoautograph  Machine that records vibrations on a carbonized paper cylinder by Leon Scott de Martinville introduced magnetic recording technology
1874  Remington Typewriter Keyboard writing
1980s TeX Digital Typesetting Engine Computer program typographer describing the printed page in digital code by Donald E. Knuth
2000  E-Ink Electronic ink printed on re-useable plastic pages

In the year 2000, Wisconsin's Fox River Valley with nineteen paper mills has the largest concentration of paper mills in the world.

Wisconsin is the number one U.S. paper producer with approximately 5.3 million tons of paper produced annually at 47 paper mills.

The U.S. paper industry employs nearly 53,000 people at 598 mills. 

Magnetic Disk Storage
 

1950 Magnetic Drum Storage Engineering Research Associates built the first device for the U.S. Navy, to store one million bits of data
1956 Magnetic Disk Storage IBM the 305 RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) storing five Mbytes on fifty, 24-inch diameter disks
1961 First Magnetic Disk Drive IBM Mainframe
1970 Eight inch Floppy Disk IBM & Shugart
1973 PC Hard Disk drive IBM 30 MBytes
1980 1 Gigbyte Storage IBM 3380, unit weighed 550 pounds costing $40,000
1980 5 1/4" Floppy Drive Seagate Technology 5 Mbytes
1980 Optical Laser Drive – Compact Disk Prototype by Phillips
1981, 3 1/2" Floppy Drive Apple and  Sony
1982 Audio CD Players  Philips and Sony
1984 CD-ROM Data Drives
1985 Hard Card Quantum 0.5 MB hard disk mounted on an ISA PCs board
1987 Video CD format  Sony
1988 CD-Recordable Disc/Recorder Technology
1997 DVD Released  (3.9 Gbytes).
6/20/00 1 inch CD drive 1 Gbyte IBM