in a single round of digit-pair radix sorting, you can put 100 piles of ≈1000 bills each into 10×10 cubbyholes, a piece of furniture which is small enough to fit on a desk. then you need about 20 minutes to linearly search through one such pile when the dj announces a number, which is probably fast enough to win

if you have a second cubbyhole array, when you linearly search through a pile chosen from the first cubbyhole array, you can radix-sort that pile by another two digits, dividing it into piles of ≈10 bills. those piles are small enough that you can keep them sorted as you build them without much loss of efficiency, even on a computer

if you can fill the first array with 100 wallets with 10 numbered tabs each, like the tabbed dividers in a looseleaf notebook, you can divide the bills into 1000 piles on the first radix-sorting pass. in practice it might be too much work to find or make the wallets

but i think the sad thing about michael larson's story is not that he didn't know enough about computer 'science' (or, i guess, library 'science'), but that he spent more effort searching for a hack that would make hard things easy than it would have taken to do them the hard way, destroying his personal relationships in the process