Many of these systems later became known as document imaging systems, because they focused on the capture, storage, indexing and retrieval of image file formats. The earliest electronic document management (EDM) systems managed either proprietary file types, or a limited number of file formats. Later developers began to write a second type of system which could manage electronic documents, i.e., all those documents, or files, created on computers, and often stored on users' local file-systems. These systems dealt with paper documents, which included not only printed and published documents, but also photographs, prints, etc.
Beginning in the 1980s, a number of vendors began to develop software systems to manage paper-based documents.
