It's interesting that we've gotten away from this as more and more things have moved onto computers.

I worked with some legacy systems in the government that still used paper case files and it struck me one day how the "status" of a case was, in a very real way, represented by the file's physical location. Just submitted? The file is in the mail room. Ready for processing? In a clerk's inbox. Ready for review? In a supervisor's inbox.

It's basically a decentralized system, where each stage knows where the file goes next. Much different than our centralized databases today.