In The Beginning , there was paper. A whole lot of it. Today's electronic, cybernetic, digital world had its genesis in books and journals, reports and memos, and even some hand-typed pages, many of them dating from the decades between 1930 and 1960.

This past February, the biggest private collection of this paper went up for sale at Christie's auction house in New York City. From the early mechanical calculators of the 17th century through the birth of electronic computing during World War II up to the founding of the Internet in the 1970s, some of the most important documents in the history of computing and telecommunications went under the gavel.

Before the auction, the general public could visit the collection and even handle many of the items--albeit under the watchful eyes of Christie's staff. Visitors could leaf through an unpublished 1809 manuscript on the influential Jacquard loom (punch cards were used to program the loom to weave patterns) written by Joseph Marie Jacquard himself [See Figure]; a signed first edition of Karel Capek's R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots, the 1920 play that coined the term robot; or Norbert Wiener's own first-edition copy of his 1948 book [Cybernetics], heavily annotated by Wiener with corrections for the second edition.

The auction itself found the collection's owner and seller, , a bespectacled bookseller based in Novato, Calif., sitting nervously in front of the auctioneer's podium. Norman is an oddity: a professional rare-book dealer, with a history degree, who can sift through circuit schematics and faded equations and discern the work of genius.

"No other individual has ever tried to collect the origins of electronic computing," Norman says, and indeed, February's auction was the first high-profile sale of a significant amount of such literature. Although Norman knew little about technology, he explained that he was inspired to start collecting related items when in "1970 or 1971, I was in New York, and at the time IBM had an office on Park Avenue with a history wall on display."

The history wall, a mosaic of reproduced documents and images, inspired Norman to purchase some rare mathematical tables printed on an early calculating machine for US $22.50. As the years went by, Norman continued buying computing-related items, mostly from the 19th century and earlier. Eventually, when this first collection grew to about 150 pieces, he sold it, in 1994.