Digital Document Storage System for a Large Insurance Company
This project from the early 1980s illustrates the dramatic
changes that have taken place in the past 20 - 25 years. It also
demonstrates what can happen when we try to commercialize something
before the technology is ready.
I was still an employee of the 3M Company, and the idea of
digitizing, storing, distributing, and displaying documents
electronically, and restoring hardcopies from an electronic format
were merely fantasies of large companies that processed tons of
handwritten paper forms, letters, and pictures.
Our first beta-site customer was a large insurance company. We
used their operation as a model for an integrated electronic
document system. In our first visit to the site, our team took a
detailed tour of the operation. My task was to record everything and
write a functional description that would guide the design of our
system.
We followed the path of a document through the company's system.
We began at the beginning, in the mail room. We saw the sorters, and
were told the volume of incoming mail per day, and so forth. The
numbers were staggering. We followed the documents as they moved to
various stations in bins that ran on a mini elevated rail system,
until they found a place in one of five different libraries.
Then we spoke with the people who needed to see the documents
quickly. They worked directly with customers on the telephone, and
when they got a call, they needed the customer's paper file as
quickly as possible. Usually they waited on the phone while the
documents were manually retrieved from storage and delivered to
their desk. The prospect of replacing this process with electronic
equipment and wire was tantalizing.
When we returned from our trip, I wrote the functional
description of the company's operation, and our team designed a
hierarchical system architecture that matched the company's
operation: document scanning in the mailrooms, communication links
to central storage and the five operations areas, and finally links
to high-resolution displays and keyboards at the customer service
sites. Then we got to work designing and building the system.
The basic technologies we needed were
Facsimile scanners to convert paper to electronic format
Communication links to transmit electronic documents
Computer systems with magnetic disk drives to route and
provide temporary storage of the documents
Display terminals to present the electronic images to the
workers
First of all, even though these technologies existed in the
commercial sense, they were not suitable for the high-bandwidth and
storage requirements of digitized documents. Fax machines were huge
at the time; they looked like the large production copiers.
Communication networks like the Ethernet were new. There was no such
thing as driving to a store and buying a network card; there were no
network cards. A magnetic disk drive with 500 Mbytes of capacity was
new technology, and they had 14" disks in them. A display terminal
with a resolution suitable for digitized images was also a brand new
item; there were few choices because they were primarily a
futuristic commercial oddity.
But the major need for new technology rested in the storage of
the digitized documents' data. The volume of this data was huge by
the standards of the day; there were no digital mass storage
elements suitable for the task. The original plan was to use the new
optical disk technology, but it was clear that it would not be
commercial in our time frame. We finally decided to use a
Computer-Output-Microfiche (COM) jukebox as the storage element, at
least until optical disk drives, media, and jukeboxes became
available.
The team grew. We branched out into our areas, one person on the
display, one person on the scanner, one person on the COM, and so
forth. We decided on a custom dual-bus computer architecture, and I
designed the main computer board, which had a relatively new MC68000
microprocessor, and a very large (at the time)
time-division-multiplexed dynamic RAM array to hold document data,
and included programmable logic devices called PALS, a new
technology at the time.
Every device, the scanner, the display, the printer, the computer
system, needed development: packaging into an enclosure,
documentation, interface design and debug, and system integration.
We ended up with five equipment racks and a bunch of wire. The
system really did move documents quickly, and data compression
technology was not even available in chip form yet.
I left 3M to begin my consulting practice just before the system
was installed. My friends at 3M tell me, the system worked fine on
the site, and I think a system was sold to another customer. But
unfortunately, we were too early. Fax machines got small and cheap,
so did displays. Data compression and high speed networks made
digital document transmission inexpensive and available to everyone.
Now look at the technology. We can scan a photograph, send it
anywhere in the world, receive it from anywhere in the world, store
it, and print it out with very high quality. And all of this can
take place in seconds or minutes in our own homes.
