The Central Social Institution in Prague, Czechoslovakia, 1937
vintag.es
vintag.es
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.
https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Central_Bureaucracy
They even have slowmobiles!
Makes you think of total storage capacity vs. I/O bandwidth.
Or what would happen if the data required reindexing or sorting.
Edit: nope, someone else pointed out the drawers are 3m long so they roll in there! Cool
I don't know if there's also a counterweight mechanism in there, though I suspect there may be.
Reminds me of the 'bookBot' at NC State [0].
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.
Thank you for sharing this.
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.
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 ČR 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.
In the land of the obese, the medium-sized man has an eating disorder.
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.
I agree that this paperwork would be the least of the issues at that point though.
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.
In 1800, on a wooden press little changed from that Gutenberg had first used based on a wine press, a team of pressmen could produce about 120 printed sheets per hour. Those were often either folio (two pages per sheet) or quarto, but would have been one side only -- the versos were printed after allowing the first sides to dry overnight.
Iron and steel presses improved efficiency and strenth of the presses, and roughly doubled output.
Powered and rotary presses sped things up further, and by 1900, an electrically-powered offset-lithographic web press could generate one million pages per hour, a performance increase of about 10,000 fold.
At the same time, the cost of paper, especially cheap pulp newsprint (though also other grades) fell through advances in the papermaking trade itself.
The volume of printed material exploded.
A webserver is effectively a printing press of sorts, streaming bits out over a wire to be reassembled in your browser screen. By 2016, a single webserver with 8 CPU cores could deliver over 1.6 million requests per second.
https://www.rootusers.com/linux-web-server-performance-bench...
Though I doubt VR would be the goal.
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 Châtiments, 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.
"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 Renáta Provazníková.
From the Czech: https://www.novinky.cz/domaci/clanek/devet-tisic-supliku-obs...
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.
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 Greplová, 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.)