The irony of resources of this nature is that they're not really available on the internet...
My dad was the office manager for a water company in a small town. In one corner of the office was a card catalog sorted by address. Each card had a little hand-drawn map showing the distance and bearing of the home's shutoff valve. If you didn't pay your bill, someone would pull the card, copy the data off it, show up at your house, take some measurements, and hopefully dig a single hole in your yard, and turn off your service.
A resource that you can see today would be the Bell Systems cabinet of punchcards. Every site would have a couple of these large chest-freezer-sized beasts, filled with a motorized chain of buckets, each filled to the brim with punch cards. Each card held a microfiche of an engineering drawing or technical document.
It is a daunting amount of information, and I haven't delved into the indexing of it, but... I can barely imagine it.
Anyway, you can see one in Seattle's Museum of Communications. After that, head a little bit away to the Living Computer Museum where they have a working punchcard sorter.
Lastly, apropos to this, in games like Bioshock and Dishonored I have mused about the walls and walls of filing cabinets found there. I can't imagine how a bank would function with just ledger books...
My dad was the office manager for a water company in a small town. In one corner of the office was a card catalog sorted by address. Each card had a little hand-drawn map showing the distance and bearing of the home's shutoff valve. If you didn't pay your bill, someone would pull the card, copy the data off it, show up at your house, take some measurements, and hopefully dig a single hole in your yard, and turn off your service.
A resource that you can see today would be the Bell Systems cabinet of punchcards. Every site would have a couple of these large chest-freezer-sized beasts, filled with a motorized chain of buckets, each filled to the brim with punch cards. Each card held a microfiche of an engineering drawing or technical document.
It is a daunting amount of information, and I haven't delved into the indexing of it, but... I can barely imagine it.
Anyway, you can see one in Seattle's Museum of Communications. After that, head a little bit away to the Living Computer Museum where they have a working punchcard sorter.
Lastly, apropos to this, in games like Bioshock and Dishonored I have mused about the walls and walls of filing cabinets found there. I can't imagine how a bank would function with just ledger books...