Comment by andyjohnson0

1 day ago

Interesting article, and he sounds like a clever (and, as the article says) humble guy.

> On the way home from one of those trips, Whitfield had an idea. “He was on an airplane, and he whipped out a tablet and basically drew out the whole schematic of how the clean room should work,” said Whitfield’s son Jim, who was 6 years old at the time. “It was just a simple sketch. It just took a few minutes, and it’s the basic principle that is still used today.”

This was in 1960 and he clearly drew it on paper. So is/was "tablet" a common term for a pad of paper? I've never heard it used in any context other than a slab of stone or a derivation of such.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet#Inscription,_printing,_...

Minor point but struck me as odd.

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andyjohnson0

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Archelaos  1 day ago

Etymonline states: "The meaning 'pad of writing or blotting paper' is by 1880".[1] Also see the variety of meanings listed it the Webster 1913 edition, including: "1. A small table or flat surface. 2. A flat piece of any material on which to write, paint, draw, or engrave; also, such a piece containing an inscription or a picture. 3. Hence, a small picture; a miniature. [Obs.] 4. pl. A kind of pocket memorandum book. [...]".[2] -- No information on the frequency of use, though.

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/tablet

[2] https://www.websters1913.com/words/Tablet

throwup238  1 day ago

> So is/was "tablet" a common term for a pad of paper?

In drafting it was a pad of drawing or tracing paper.

  • ludicrousdispla  1 day ago

    Also, typically glue bound along the top edge and having a solid backing, as if you took a hardbound book (of blank pages) and ripped off the front cover and spine. Pages could easily be peeled off, if glued at the edge, or torn off if perforated.

o1bf2k25n8g5  1 day ago

I picture it as a legal pad, more or less. If I really think about it, I imagine a "legal pad" as having that very specific paper (lined, with that nice margin), whereas a "tablet" could perhaps be any type of paper bound together in that same way.

I'm not entirely sure where I got these impressions from over the years, though I certainly used to use a lot of legal pads. I still really like stumbling across a nice one in the wild, even if I usually just get them from Amazon nowadays. (Aside: Is it just me, or are legal pads not as good these days as they used to be?)

Anyway, from this bit on Wikipedia about legal pads, it seems like that is one origin story for using "tablet" in this context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notebook#Legal_pad

Notably, from the last sentence of that story:

> ...he glued together a stack of halved sheets of paper, supported by a sheet of cardboard, creating what he called the "Silver City Writing Tablet".

  • Brybry  1 day ago

    Looks like paper tablets even predate that 1902 use. This source has newspaper ads for "Pencil Tablets" and "Writing Tablets": bound ruled and un-ruled paper with and without covers from 1894-1895: https://www.kristinholt.com/archives/3205

    I wonder if binding at the top was necessary to be called a tablet? Or perforation to easily tear off sheets?

    I was looking to see how long ago marble composition notebooks (which are side-bound) were created and what they were called and it looks like they existed in the mid-1800s but I couldn't find any evidence they were called tablets.

dmd  1 day ago

Growing up in the 1980s in suburbs of NYC my elementary school teachers always asked us to get our “tablets” out to work on math.