It is now commonplace that everything happens online, whether for work or play. Without the internet, ordering food has become unthinkable, it's getting harder to meet people, and more and more jobs are being replaced by workstations at home, using just a laptop. But what has it taken to make this fantastic transformation? And where did we start?
Digital vs. analogue
Although it is often used to contrast digital document management with working with paper documents, it is surprising that digitisation has actually enabled companies to produce unprecedented amounts of paper documents. The development of printing and personal computers has made the production of documents extremely cheap, and so individual companies and different organisations have started to produce an incredible amount of documents. However, the solution lies in digital transformation.
A new era thanks to digitalisation
The electronic transformation of our lives began in the 1950s, when IBM introduced the first magnetic disks, which in the following decades led to an exponential increase in computer storage capacity. The first scanners also appeared in the middle of the century, and after some twenty years of technological development, the 1970s saw the so-called Project Gutenberg, which made it possible to make more and more historically important texts available to everyone electronically.
Digitisation today
A digitisation has not stopped since the Gutenberg Project, and has been accelerating since the 2000s. Just as the most remote parts of the world are connected by high-speed internet and it is possible to store almost unlimited amounts of documents in online cloud services, it is now possible to manage documents that are important for everyday use but cannot be preserved in the long term in purely digital form.
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