Magstore Ltd of Aldershot, Hampshire is distributing a turnkey system in the UK which accurately emulates the technology of filing cabinets – it is offering a document image storage system for UKP13,300. The system comprises a Panasonic LF5010 optical disk drive, a Victor 286 tower system with 80Mb of hard disk courtesy of Quantum and a colour monitor, a Panasonic scanner, Canon laser printer and Alexsys EZ software. The software has been developed by the US company Courtlands and EZ is the cut-down version of software originally developed for larger format systems requiring high resolution graphics cards and so forth. Magstore does not have exclusive distribution rights for the software but believes it is the only UK distributor offering Alexsys as part of a turnkey system. The software has been written specifically for optical Write Once Read Many disk drives and Magstore says that differentiates it from many document storage systems that are part of database management systems. Alexsys files documents in separate file cabinet databases and the system is left to the user’s discretion but can faithfully follow whatever manual method was used previously. The 940Mb optical cartridge can hold approximately 18,000 A4-sized pages (graphics require more space than text), and when more storage is required, another cartridge can be slotted in. The cartridges cost from UKP80 for a 70Mb single-sided disk to UKP135 for a 940Mb disk. However, the index to all the files, irrespective of cartridge, is held on the hard disk.
