I suppose it all started with a caveman sketching a picture of animals on the wall of his cave. It was his way of recording what he saw for others in the future. Later the ancient Egyptians would develop hieroglyphics. And like the cave drawings these also would provide a record of things for the future. Then along come the Chinese who invented paper. And with paper they made scrolls to document what is going on in the world around them.

Before you know it humans are documenting everything. And with all of this documentation comes the need to store these documents in an organized way. Scrolls would be stored in drawers. Then the drawers would be labeled. After scrolls we started storing related documents in individual files. Then these files were organized in traditional filing cabinets. When this started taking up too much room we developed microfilm.

It’s at this point that we went as far as we could with storing documents because retrieval turned into a daunting task. The current evolution of filing is being done by document management software vendors. After all, this is the digital age. Storage takes up very little space and retrieval is a breeze. And that’s why it is the current evolution of filing.

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