[HN Gopher] The Filing Cabinet
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       The Filing Cabinet
        
       Author : pepys
       Score  : 20 points
       Date   : 2021-05-14 18:53 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (placesjournal.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (placesjournal.org)
        
       | gumby wrote:
       | I moved house a couple of years ago and one thing that astonished
       | me is how much apparatus I had for managing paper (file folders,
       | cabinets, staplers, and other apparatus) which I no longer
       | needed. The books, of course I kept. CDs and other non-paper
       | physical carriers of data were long gone, but I had so much paper
       | which I no longer needed, nor the infrastructure for managing it.
       | 
       | Since then if I see a photo or movie with that stuff it always
       | jumps out at me.
        
         | ghaff wrote:
         | I won't say I rarely use paper (outside of books) but it's
         | usually for some ephemeral purpose like a shopping list. Or my
         | paper calendar/notebook that I often prefer to do on paper for
         | various purposes. I have some file cabinets behind me in my
         | office and I found a fabric print to hang over them so my
         | background wasn't quite so ugly for video calls and recording
         | videos. I maybe take it down to access something once every
         | couple months. And, yeah, a stapler or paper clips is something
         | I might use once a month if that.
        
       | hilbert42 wrote:
       | As I've been saying for years, if my information were stored in
       | these filing cabinets then it'd be a damn side more secure than
       | if it were stored electronically. And if any leakage were to
       | occur then it'd result in a smaller because physical access has
       | very practical limits.
        
       | colonelxc wrote:
       | I was surprised that the (1921) filing cabinet comic featured a
       | "Mr. Google" that did the organizing. I thought this was a case
       | of someone editing a comic, but it turns out that's how it was:
       | 
       | https://www.google.com/books/edition/Filing_Office_Managemen...
        
         | kingsuper20 wrote:
         | Well, it isn't like Snuffy Smith was going to do the filing.
         | 
         | While I've always liked early physical filing systems, and
         | something like a Globe-Wernicke cabinet can be quite beautiful
         | (although they often only have one finished side), I'd really
         | like to know about earlier systems.
         | 
         | I mean, the British Admiralty or the Venetian Republic had some
         | serious paperwork storage, usually bound volumes on shelves I
         | imagine. Crazy stuff.
         | 
         | A good subhistory of storage would be the invention of those
         | room-sized shelves on wheels so that there's only one access
         | path. I've seen some impressive ones.
        
       | mikewarot wrote:
       | Old ways of maintaining indexes and records are interesting, and
       | quite clever.
       | 
       | Marriage records had indexes, constructed on the fly. There was
       | the equivalent of a radix sort, pages for a, b, c... m, mc,
       | ...through z. The bride-groom and groom-bride entries were both
       | made sequentially in the index page, with the page number for the
       | main record added. A search for bride or groom meant reading only
       | a page or two of index records. Sometimes the page number was
       | written wrong, but reversing the bride-groom index gave you a
       | second chance at it.
       | 
       | The main records were sequentially recorded by license issue
       | date, when the book got full, a new book was started.
       | 
       | All of this in fairly readable, well written cursive.
        
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