Edge-notched card
The database before the computer: cards with a row of holes along the edge, a needle through the deck — and the cards matching the query drop out.
Along the card's edges runs a row of pre-punched holes. To encode an attribute, a hole is clipped open into a notch; the actual data is written or pasted in the middle. Retrieval is physical: square up the deck, push a needle — knitting needles were the standard tool — through the hole position for the wanted attribute, and lift. Notched cards have nothing to hang on to and fall out; the rest stay put. Several needles at once give you logical AND.
Systems like McBee Keysort and Cope-Chat served libraries, medical practices and field biologists from the 1940s on: a searchable database with no electricity and a query language made of stainless steel. Cheap computers made the cards obsolete in the 1970s — batch size had always been capped at what you could lift.