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:
That comic didn't originate with Filing and Office Management; it’s from the long-running syndicated newspaper strip Barney Google. The eponymous character of that strip may actually have indirectly inspired the name of the company: the mathematician who coined the term “googol” (after which the company was named) got it from his nephew, and it’s been suggested that he in turn got the word from the comic, which was very popular at the time. (The comic in turn got it from a 1913 children’s picturebook called “The Google Book,” about the various creatures of Googleland.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I strongly suspect that the answer is ‘no,’ though it is fun to think about. The etymology I’ve always heard is simply that the filesystem is a mathematical tree, with all of the metaphor that comes with it: it’s convenient to have ready terms such as ‘branch’ and ‘leaf’ (though in a file system those are generally supplanted by ‘directory’ and ‘file’ respectively)—and, of course, a ‘root’ at the bottom from which springs everything else.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Filing_Office_Managemen...