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According to the Wikipedia, the Xerox 914 was introduced in 1959, and, by the end of 1961, Xerox was up to $60m in revenue. But my recollection is, Xerox machines didn't start popping up everywhere until the mid to late sixties. I wonder when the Hawaii Department of Health bought their first Xerox machine. Those Nordyke long form copies were issued in 1966 and were clearly photostats (negative images).

The best thing for Hawaii to do would be to scan all their documents at 300dpi and save them in a database replicated on the mainland in case Mauna Loa goes. But they probably have several million documents by now, so it would cost a nice sum to scan them all and check them over to ensure they match up with the existing metadata they have in their database.

At 20,000 BCs per year, then you have about 52/53 years worth of records, or OVER 1 million since statehood. Earlier records would presumably be under the control of National Archives.

I think these guys been shuckin' and jivin' and they have microfilm and/or microfiche records with copies back to Statehood!.

The 9/14 (according to several histories on the net) was able to do about 20 copies per hour which made it quite suitable for hooking up with a camera.

It was a "heavy duty" paper mover primarily, and a photocopier secondarily, and then it had these other uses that dovetailed nicely with the technology of the time (microfiche systems).

So, let's envision bound files for a moment. With 1,000,000 records ~ with something like a 28 pound paper weight, and 200 pieces per ream, that'd be 5,000 reams.

At 5 pounds per ream, you'd have 25,000 pounds of paper, or roughly 12.5 tons.

Double that weight for folders, hangers, cheap file cabinets, personnel walking around, stray coffee cups, and maybe even a set of wheels with fancy spinners and you could easily have 25 tons. Real quick, GM's standard for floor capacity when using a lift to load a truck with this gross weight is: "The floor on which the lift is to be installed must be 5 inch minimum thickness concrete with a minimum compressive strength of 3000 PSI, and reinforced with steel bar."

Open storage space would probably need to have 1800 sq ft set aside for the cabinet footprints, and about 1.25 times that for access, aisles and airflow and so forth, and that'd give you 4,000 sq. ft. for the paper record file storage area. At a cost of about $185 per square foot (current value) for that sort of space, that give you just under $800,000 for the file room ~ plus HVAC and dehumidfication equipment ~ lights ~ and several hundred additional square foot adjunct so you could do microfiche and crank this stuff down to digital files stored on a handful of DVDs.

Someone has said they've seen the file room. Was it about 4,000 sq. ft. (That's about 40ft by 100ft so you couldn't miss it ~ be a big room!)?

Given bureaucracy's insatiable need for more space, a bigger office ~ right over there in the corner, more toilets, wider aisles ~ extra snack areas ~ I doubt even this DOH could keep control of that much space. They must have been under intense pressure to "give it up" long ago, so what did they do?