Filing Cabinets

December 8, 2016 - By

Today I spent a lot of time thinking about filing cabinets.

It all started when Dustin sent me this safety video. I guess these could be a hazard.

It wasn’t too long ago that this is where information was stored. I can’t imagine working without computers. Think about it now; if you needed a piece of information having to move you and your carbon over to a big metal box, exploring the contents (trusting the sorting and tagging judgements of your colleagues) to find a specific piece of carbon with information on it.

Then I wondered how much information you could store in one compared to a hard drive

Josh and I did some research. One site featured someone speculating that his filing cabinet could store 11,696 sheets. Another suggested that each sheet could hold 6,460 characters (these things could be so variable, we found a wide range of values, but let’s roll with these). Josh quickly banged out a formula:

11696*6460/1024/1024 = 72.055969238

Pages × characters (gives total characters) divided by 1024 (gives total bytes), divided again by 1024 (gives total megabytes) = 72.05MB. That’s really not that much. I could fit thousands of filing cabinets on my modest two year old laptop.

Filing Cabinets!

Photo – Moving Out by Phil Roeder 

So next time you painlessly use Finder, Windows Explorer, Alfred or other file nabbing utilities to find or organize something give some thought to how things could have been!

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This post was written by ArleyM