Tell It to the Marines

From the Tech Vault Dept.: Some of my old stories pop up and inspire no recollection at all of writing it. I interviewed people, I put together quotes, I cranked out 1300 words. And I don’t remember a damn thing about it. Reading it today, I’m impressed – as I am with so many of my elderly tech pieces – at how obsolete everything in the story has become. The magazine itself, VARBusiness, I do remember mostly because I so enjoyed working with editor Beth Adelman. But we lost touch not long after this as other magazines lured me with more money. Until the whole computer-magazine empire collapsed. VARBusiness retooled its website in 2005, but has now been absorbed into CRN, “a media brand of The Channel Company.” Anyway, here’s how the Marines stored data 34 years ago.

                                                                          

YOU KNOW THE FRUSTRATION of accumulating page after page of information that needs to be filed? Documents that you may not need right now, but you know they’re going to come in handy. And they sit in rows of cabinets, hogging valuable office space.

Tell it to the Marines.

Millions of documents are stored in the Installation & Logistics operation at U.S. Marine Corps Headquarters in Washington, D.C. Material ranges from accounting data to troop lists, and keeping the paperwork up to date forced a heavy workload on the staff of 700. And even at its most efficient, the system only allowed one person access to a document at a time. 

Thanks to what’s billed as the world’s largest document image processing (DIP) system, filing cabinets and attendant frustration were replaced last June by a PC-based scanning system.