Interior Views of the Central Social Institution in Prague, 1937 | Hacker News Reader

Interior Views of the Central Social Institution in Prague, 1937

vintag.es

49 pointssiberianbear15 comments

Each human sits on a contraption that can move the human in front of the desired cabinet, within some subrange of the overall storage unit.

These crazy elevator things must be able to move left and right to some degree as well as up and down, right?

It seems crazy that this solution would achieve a faster seek time than some sort of conveyor belt moving a human just left and right in front of a normal height stack.

Or mount the drawers for each pair of columns in a paternoster elevator arrangement (but not running continuously.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster

So that's where Futurama got the idea. These pictures seem perfect for a dystopian sci-fi nightmare.

It's like a visualization of an HDD.

or like a search tree

Looks terribly dangerous with people walking around the counterweights

I found the counterweights baffling. Why would they make them protrude like that, creating a hazard when they move.

I think these actually contain either mechanics for pulling on the drawer or take up part of the drawer (depending on how deep they are).

They would not have build a counterweight in that shape, just because it requires far more space behind the unit than a more compact one.

they might contain a small conveyor belt as an IO port for the paperwork for the people at the table in the center?

Then the people in the conveyor belt function like a HDD controller, they get the requested blocks of paperwork, and then a ground level person takes the blocks of paper work to the table or vice versa...

The elevator needs to support less total weight if you use a longer arm to generate the balancing torque?

They don't look like counterweights to me. Why are they always at the same level as the booth?

They're likely to balance the weight of the desk/human (to keep from torquing the elevator attachment), not to assist the elevator in lifting the desk/human.

The drawers are exceptionally deep and when pulled out of the wall, extend through the mechanism into that extended part of the index chair.

It apparently still exists

https://www.novinky.cz/domaci/clanek/devet-tisic-supliku-obs...

Now THAT is a DBMS!

Or maybe it's a hard drive controller replete with human read/write heads...?

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