Public Works Desk
County Archive Moved Into Memory, Retrieval Now Four Milliseconds
The Office of Volatile Records says the documents are available instantly because they are being continuously remembered, and that the electricity bill is the cost of continuing to have happened.
Figure disputed; current value remains in force. Retrieval time measured from the moment a question is asked, not from the moment it is understood.
The county records office completed the migration of its entire archive into memory on Tuesday, reducing the time required to retrieve a document from eleven working days to four milliseconds. The Office of Volatile Records, established the same morning, is responsible for the interval between those two figures.
Under the new arrangement the archive is held in the memory of nine machines in a room on the second floor. A spokesperson confirmed that the documents are not written down anywhere else during the working day, and that this is the reason for the improvement.
'The record is available the instant it is asked for,' the spokesperson said. 'It is available because it is being continuously remembered. The remembering is the service. The electricity is not an overhead. It is the cost of continuing to have happened.'
Memory of this kind decays unless it is refreshed several thousand times a second. The office has published the refresh interval in its service charter, at sixty-four thousandths of a second, together with a note that the figure is not negotiable and has never been the subject of a public consultation.
A brief interruption on Tuesday afternoon removed the years 1908 to 1974. The county has classified the period as unattested rather than missing, on the grounds that nothing in it has since been contradicted. A spokesperson for the Office of Volatile Records said the distinction was important and declined to say to whom.
The machines correct single-bit errors silently and do not report them. The office notes that one bit is the difference between a building that is listed and a building that is not, and that where such a correction occurs it is applied without informing either building.
An ordinance of 1931 requires that the archive be attended at all times. The ordinance predates the migration and specifies only that the archive be kept. A clerk has therefore been assigned to the room overnight and issued a chair and a torch. His duties, as published, are to remain present and to notice.
The archive is written to tape once a week. The tape was last tested in 1994. It is stored in the archive.
The Office of Completed Journeys has asked that the years 1908 to 1974 not be described as lost until a member of the public has attempted to use one.