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
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Well this specific part of that department of the ČR 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
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.
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 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.
>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.
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.
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.
And since I didn't clearly note the impacts of printing-press changes:
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Renáta Provazníková.
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.
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."
