[HN Gopher] The Central Social Institution in Prague, Czechoslov...
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The Central Social Institution in Prague, Czechoslovakia, 1937
Author : dredmorbius
Score : 151 points
Date : 2022-05-29 23:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vintag.es)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vintag.es)
| lynguist wrote:
| Absolutely awesome.
| baybal2 wrote:
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I can't help but consider it a Flintstone-style proto-HDD where
| human-powered r/w heads move to read/write sectors.
| iNate2000 wrote:
| Oh! That reminds me of an idea I had once for a "kid-powered
| computer". Here is a sketch that I made to illustrate how a
| disk-drive works: https://flic.kr/p/an8kAA
| dredmorbius wrote:
| You don't have any plans, by chance, of designing
| perpetually-running trains, do you, Wilfred?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That's pretty much precisely what this is, with 10 heads
| visible (there are several other banks of cabinets), each of
| which can address, erm, _access_ , only a fixed set of storage
| (a 20w x 25h bank of drawers).
|
| Makes you think of total storage capacity vs. I/O bandwidth.
|
| Or what would happen if the data required reindexing or
| sorting.
| vincent-manis wrote:
| It reminded me of the automated tape library systems of the
| last century (I imagine that some of those might still be in
| operation).
| dredmorbius wrote:
| For a sense of total storage capacity represented here....
|
| The total storage is 27 linear km of drawer capacity, arranged in
| 2 aisles of 9 banks of 500 drawers (25 h x 20 w), 3m in length.
|
| Paper storage capacity is about 6,000 sheets per linear meter.
|
| https://www.ilmcorp.com/tools-and-resources/estimate-the-num...
|
| So the capacity here is roughly for 162 million sheets of paper,
| at 100% loading. Few storage systems operate (or can function) at
| 100% load, but let's look for a maximum.
|
| Data per sheet is probably relatively sparse, based on forms and
| fields, but at a maximum for comfortable reading might reach 500
| words/page, at 6 bytes/word, or about 3 kB/page (decimal).
|
| That's a total of ... just under 500 GB of storage maximum.
|
| In practice, individual drawers would likely be kept to less than
| 80% capacity, and the fields on any given form would amount to
| perhaps 10% of total textual capacity, or about 25 GB of actual
| data stored.
|
| An alternative print data format is michrofiche (or more
| generally, microforms), which reduce texts to about 4% of their
| original size. The 9,000 drawers here might have been reduced to
| 360 under such a scheme, less than 3/4 of a single bank shown,
| though of course, individual sheets could not be inserted,
| instead they'd have to be printed onto new fiche cards and cross-
| referenced somehow. There was a considerable microforms
| revolution during the early-and-mid 20th century, and I can
| remember a library whose catalogue existed on fiche, updated
| periodically from the computerised database used for circulation,
| in the 1970s.
| HidyBush wrote:
| I wonder how futuristic that looked to the people at the time
| dredmorbius wrote:
| It was quite literally the pinacle of data storage and
| management.
|
| There's a whole host of advances that were made from, say, 1800
| -- 1950, which we mostly gloss over. The technologies seem
| obvious today, but were considerable:
|
| - Iron, and later steel, replacing wood, in printing presses.
|
| - Steam and later electricity, replacing human power, in
| printing presses.
|
| - Roller, and later web, paper transport rather than a platten
| and screw press.
|
| - Much cheaper paper manufacture. With concommitant problems of
| acid pulp paper disintegrating over time. (The late 19th
| century Librarian of Congress reports have extensive appendices
| on paper manufacture and technology:
| https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015036735036&vi...
|
| - Index cards. As of the 1880s, the US Library of Congress
| _printed its catalogue as a set of bound volumes_ (distributed,
| among other locations, to customs offices at ports to check for
| imported contraband pirated books). This proved increasingly
| nonfeasible as the collection grews.
|
| - Loose-leaf bindings. The whole notion of a codex-arranged
| book _to which pages could be added or removed_ was a novelty.
| The convenience of a book, the manageability of a card
| catalogue. You 'll find numerous loose-leaf mechanisms in late
| 19th / early 20th century stationers' catologues and patent
| filings.
|
| - Standardised business correspondence. As information
| technology has improved, the personal and flowery nature of
| writing has eroded. "Telegraphic" writing emerged with that
| device. Printers and publishers such as Twain and Franklin had
| a _physical feel_ for words set in type, as well as _cliche_
| and _stereotype_ (literal physical blocks of unchanging text).
| Massive departmental enterprises with either geographically-
| diverse (railroads, telegraph companies) or technically complex
| (chemical and refining operations) required management of
| procedures and information flows out of necessity.
|
| - Punch cards would have been another alternative to the Czech
| archive shown here, though cards would have had limited
| capacity (80 bytes/card), with limited human readability.
| Compressed data formats originating on cards gave us the Y2K
| problem.
|
| At about the time the Central Social Institution was opened,
| advances in photography, microphotography and microforms were
| underway.
|
| This was also the period in which the US Library of Congress
| Classification was being developed, a history I'm exploring
| myself presently.
| hexo wrote:
| To author: Use metric system already, this imperialistic ** is
| bonkers.
| arethuza wrote:
| For some reason this reminds me of the part of _Consider Phlebas_
| where a Culture Mind contemplates it 's own storage capacity in
| terms of hand written paper cards...
| freemint wrote:
| Looks a lot like SRAM (to be fair anything vaguely rectangular in
| a huge orthogonal grid looks like RAM to me). You can even see
| the memory banks.
| danschumann wrote:
| Looks like something out of a Marvel movie.
| zeroth32 wrote:
| Something similar was still used in 1980ties. It kept employment
| history to calculate social benefits and pensions. Communist
| government had no access to modern electronics and computers. We
| still used punch cards in 1987.
| ajuc wrote:
| Communist governments had their own mainframes (for example
| weird 24 bit Odra systems in Poland). They weren't as modern as
| in the west but certainly didn't used punch cards in late 80s.
| Of course "normal" people had no access to them.
| tompazourek wrote:
| Now that's what I call a document database.
|
| Thank you for sharing this.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There's larger.
|
| I'm trying to find some good visual sources for the US National
| Archives' Federal Record Centres.
|
| This video gives some sense of scale:
|
| https://yewtu.be/watch?v=VczfZAXPqnQ
|
| There are multiple records facilities. Many are in natural
| caves underground.
|
| https://www.archives.gov/frc/locations
| euroderf wrote:
| Beats the hell outa Minority Report eh
| clarionbell wrote:
| FYI it's still operational, although not used for day to day ops.
|
| From what I heard, back during the communist times, power
| sometimes failed and people were left stuck at their tables. So
| they had to keep a ladder close by.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Both statements are true by accounts I've read.
|
| Ladders were added to the desks during a later renovation, I
| believe in 1970s:
|
| _Although the number of employees decreased rapidly, mainly
| due to digitization, the file remained in its original form. It
| underwent innovations only in the 1970s, when ladders were
| installed at the stackers for safety reasons._
|
| _Zuzana Greplova, head of the administration and registration
| of claims documents, who has been working here for more than 40
| years, remembers the times without a ladder with a smile. "When
| the power went out, we had to pull out the outlets and
| gradually descend them, either in the dark or with a
| flashlight."_
|
| From the Czech: https://www.novinky.cz/domaci/clanek/devet-
| tisic-supliku-obs...
|
| They're visible in the bottom two photos in this collection:
|
| https://fotoscuriosas.org/the-offices-of-the-central-social-...
|
| (There are also other older interior views.)
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Interesting that there wasn't any failsafe mechanism to lower
| you down gently if power went out.
| vintermann wrote:
| The failsafe was probably rather to prevent you from getting
| _rapidly_ lowered if the power went out, as it is with most
| elevators.
| Pulcinella wrote:
| Add in the Prague Pneumatic Post for some real retro future
| "world of tomorrow" vibes.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_pneumatic_post
| yread wrote:
| And I bet this building has a paternoster lift
| singlow wrote:
| Reminds me of a tape storage robot:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiNWOhl00Ao
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That's not unlike how the US Library of Congress operated, at
| least conceptually. From the 1897 Librarian's Report to
| Congress, following completion of the present Jefferson Library
| building, adjacent to the Capitol:
|
| _As a part of the present system, there is a pneumatic tube, a
| tunnel, and eletric machinery for the transmission of books
| from the Library to the Capitol. It would be impossible to
| overestimate the importance of this ingeniuous work in the
| practical efficiency of Library administration. A test was made
| of its operations on October 27 [1897] by the Library
| officials. The telephone was not yet in operation, and
| therefore the experiment was under imperfect conditions.
| Without any prearrangement or forewarning, a request for boosk
| was conveyed through the pneumatic tube from the capitaol to
| the reading desk in the new library. In ten minutes and five
| seconds the volume asked for reached the Capitol. The second
| request was for four books --- one in English, the other three
| in Italian, German, and French, respectively. Three of them,
| the Italian, German, and English, came within eight minutes and
| eleven seconds. The French Volume, Les Chatiments, arrived two
| minutes later.... The test was notable as demonstrating the
| practical convenience of the Library in the service of Congress
| and the Supreme Court._
|
| https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924112523760&vi...
|
| Note that the Supreme Court at the time met in the Capitol (in
| the Old Senate Chambers). The expanded library was a huge
| improvement over the old quarters (immediately west of the
| Supreme Court, in the Capitol itself), where 800,000 books were
| housed in a space designed for 200,000, and in which haphazard
| stacking and poor cataloguing greatly hindered access.
|
| The expanded library was the life work of the previous
| Librarian, Ainsworth Rand Spofford, whose vision largely shapes
| the Library as it exists today.
| alde wrote:
| It is fun to think if it as if this is what data structures would
| look like if they were physical objects. A hash table taking a
| whole building.
| PKop wrote:
| Reminds me of Richard Feynman's explanation of a computer as an
| extremely large and fast filing system
|
| https://youtu.be/EKWGGDXe5MA
| lemursage wrote:
| I wonder if they had some collision avoidance protocol? Possibly
| at the speed it was operating on, it wouldn't be too bad -- but I
| like to imagine that there were some harmless collision between
| two archivists who got completely submerged in their work.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Each lift serves only one bank of 500 drawers, 25 tall and 20
| wide.
| PufPufPuf wrote:
| They probably were divided into non-overlapping horizontal
| sections - it doesn't seem there is a way to go around each
| other horizontally, so it would be super inefficient if they
| had to always make way for each other
| pjmorris wrote:
| Looks like they could even personalize their desks (note lamp
| unique to the guy in the foreground.)
|
| Reminds me of the 'bookBot' at NC State [0].
|
| [0] https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/hunt-library/bookbot
| RektBoy wrote:
| Hmm, seems like nothing changed in Czech city bureaus. It still
| looks like this...
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Nice. Because once there is a good virus or an electromagnetic
| impulse all the computers are gone but the Czech society will
| apparently keep functioning without problems. Also less
| vulnerable to personal data theft. I always considered mass
| digitization madness. Since the days when there actually was no
| such digitization outside the US and I read about the first
| virus troubling the Americans.
| smcl wrote:
| Well _this specific part_ of that department of the CR
| government won 't be destroyed, but it would still end up
| being non-functional. Employees won't be able to communicate
| via phone or email, clock in or out (still an important thing
| here even in modern office jobs) or beep into the building.
| More importantly however, without the ability receive pay or
| transact the population at large won't be able to buy/sell
| beer and it's _that_ which would result in a violent uprising
| here :D
| saila wrote:
| Regarding that last bit, that's something I'd like to see
| explored a bit more in apocalypse stories (whether due to a
| pandemic, natural disaster, civil breakdown, zombies,
| aliens, etc). If we lose our steady supply of caffeine,
| nicotine, and alcohol, after the first day or two people
| will absolutely lose their minds as withdrawal kicks in on
| a massive scale.
| smcl wrote:
| It's something that's said in a half-joking way here
| sometimes, that if taxes were hiked on beer there would
| be a(nother) revolution. I don't know if I agree, but it
| would certainly be political suicide for any party who
| took that position - they'd get crucified the next
| election cycle.
|
| However what I'm talking about is maybe a little
| different from what you mentioned. A sudden lack of
| supply in a commodity _is_ something we 've had in CR
| before, a few years back there was a scandal where a
| group of guys pushed tainted spirits into the market and
| the sale of spirits were outright banned for a few weeks.
| It was kinda weird how little things changed.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >Because once there is a good virus or an electromagnetic
| impulse all the computers are gone but the Czech society will
| apparently keep functioning without problems.
|
| If there's an EMP then that basically means a nuke went off.
| I doubt this building will be any safer in that case. On the
| other hand a backed up geo-redundant digital system would
| survive anything short of a society ending set of nukes.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| AFAIK the sun produces powerful EMPs every some decades and
| it's already been worrisomly long since the last time it
| did.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| An EMP is most efficiently produced by a nuke just above
| the atmosphere (or in the upper atmosphere), at that height
| the shock and heat effects would hardly be noticeable. It
| would really be dedicated to this effect, but it would have
| a pretty wide range at that altitude.
|
| I agree that this paperwork would be the least of the
| issues at that point though.
| stepanhruda wrote:
| Quite a sight to see a luddite on hacker news.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Are you genuinely surprised? Or is this some sort of
| callout?
|
| In the land of the obese, the medium-sized man has an
| eating disorder.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Luddites believe "machines are stealing our jobs", I don't.
| I worry we depend on them as if they were unable to fail
| us.
| [deleted]
| spanktheuser wrote:
| Mass digitization would seem to have a considerable
| survivability advantage over paper storage. Fire, Russian
| artillery, flood etc could readily destroy this information.
| It's fairly common to have this happen throughout history -
| we lost the Universal Music Library in a fire a little more
| than a decade ago.
| jefurii wrote:
| Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe
| dredmorbius wrote:
| If it worked for the Scholastics, it's good enough for
| us!
| dh2022 wrote:
| Isn't this one of the (many) reasons to use cloud
| computing? All major cloud computing vendors keep
| multiple copies in separate locations.
| [deleted]
| formvoltron wrote:
| Anyone know what sort of data was stored in those file cabinets?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Effectively, social security and state pension records and
| accounts.
|
| _" The Czech Social Security Administration registers records
| on the periods of citizens' pension insurance, most often they
| are pension insurance records from employers. As soon as the
| CSSA receives such a document, it registers it and, under the
| citizen's birth number, registers all other documents about the
| periods of his insurance, which are sent to it continuously,
| "adds Renata Provaznikova._
|
| From the Czech: https://www.novinky.cz/domaci/clanek/devet-
| tisic-supliku-obs...
| [deleted]
| Equiet wrote:
| This is the Czech equivalent of the Social Security
| Administration and it still works like this. Video:
| https://www.novinky.cz/domaci/clanek/devet-tisic-supliku-obs...
| (in Czech)
| kvgr wrote:
| Thats why you have to wait for a month if you want do know how
| much you owe them? :D
| xixixao wrote:
| Oh so what might look like a counter balance (the long "leg"
| sticking out of the back of the work station) is actually space
| for the drawer to slide out into, because the drawers are 3m
| long! :O
| jacquesm wrote:
| That really gives me 'Brazil' vibes, as well as a link to 'Bruce
| Almighty' (to switch genres, slightly).
| joostdevries wrote:
| Or the Steven Soderbergh movie 'Kafka'
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| Or Futurama's Central Bureaucracy.
|
| https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Central_Bureaucracy
|
| They even have slowmobiles!
| euroderf wrote:
| Combine this technology with Babbage's Difference Engine and you
| have a sort of VR already in the late 1800s ?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Given that Babbage's Difference Engine output was printed,
| there's some appropriateness.
|
| Though I doubt VR would be the goal.
| IE6 wrote:
| The design is interesting - the elevators seem to each have a
| long tail that extends a few feet behind them but there is no
| safety corridor that prevents someone or something from just
| being in that area when the elevators descends. The photos show
| people working in that 'no man's land' area and in close
| proximity to the elevator tails.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Looks like a counterweight. In the newer video above they also
| have put some hi-vis tape on it :)
|
| Edit: nope, someone else pointed out the drawers are 3m long so
| they roll in there! Cool
| IE6 wrote:
| That's cool - I thought it was a counterweight or a motor
| mechanism too but a place for the drawer to go seems obvious
| now :)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The drawers themselves are 3m long. They extend into the tail.
|
| I don't know if there's also a counterweight mechanism in
| there, though I suspect there may be.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| The mobile desks are somewhat similar to "order pickers," a type
| of forklift-like vehicle where the operator rides on the lifting
| part instead of the chassis. Often used in warehouses with high-
| bay storage to allow staff to grab single items from up high
| without having to bring a palette down and put it back up.
|
| There's a lot of interesting technology out there for high-
| density document storage. An example I'm fond of is the Kardex-
| Remstar Lektriever (what a name), which contains a continuous
| chain loop supporting a set of shelves. An operator enters a
| shelf number and the machine rotates the stacked loop of shelves
| to bring the requested one to the front of the machine. They're
| not so common for document storage these days (they were well
| suited to frequently-accessed documents like current contracts,
| which are always digitized these days) but remain common as small
| parts stores in manufacturing, e.g. for electronic components.
| They're available with built-in foam deluge fire suppression for
| this purpose.
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