The Filing Cabinet

The widespread adoption of the ‘desktop’ metaphor underscored that early personal computers would become workplace technologies.

The filing cabinet encouraged the drive to break more and more of modern life and its everyday routines into discrete, observable, and manageable parts

In the 20th-century office, female file clerks were expected to handle papers — but not to understand their contents.

To underscore their modernity, filing cabinets were called ‘equipment,’ ‘appliances,’ and ‘machines’ — not furniture.