Snail Mail Tech

Paul03244 writes "I found a fascinating Smithsonian Institute page about snail mail technology, part of the SI's National Postal Museum. Great stuff; everything from 'perforating paddles' used during the process of fumigating mail during the Yellow Fever epidemic of the 1880s; to a number of items used in Rural Mail Delivery. A great page to make us realize that even a dialup Internet connection is a great improvement over what our forebears were accustomed to just a generation or two ago."

Comments

Re:Snail Mail Bombs - Not that bad.

[OldJohnno]

One in 10 billion? Bugger-all, compared the proportion of emails that contain viruses and other nasties...

Snail mail is much more impressive than EMail...

[imsabbel]

At least if you look at the technology involved.
Getting information around isnt much of a problem, but getting a PHYSICAL object from any point in the contry to any other point over night while costing less than 1 (here in germany) is really impressive.
And even before finereader and omipage were really usable, the addresses on snail mail were identified via OCR and automatically sorted. Even the handwritten... (ok, if the ocr failed, a terminal monitor showed a worker the image of the letter and the most likely choices to decide...)

FedEx owns!

[Motherfucking Shit]

Let me get this out of the way first: FedEx fucking rules.

At least 3 days a week, more frequently 5 days a week in recent times, I'm at the center of it all. FedEx is based in Memphis, and I start many a day at the Memphis World Hub mailroom on the ramp. What most people in Memphis affectionately call "the hub," the ramp is the FedEx installation at the airport. It's fucking big, as you might expect.

The mailroom is the absolute nerve center of FedEx - well, at least in terms of physical mail; the tech nerve center is quite literally a bunker built into a grassy hill - but we're talking stuff you can carry. Imagine the corporate HQ city of a multinational, multibillion dollar corporation; now imagine the sheer volume of documents being sent back and forth between various offices. Now imagine how crucial this operation is to the survival of the company...

In terms of FedEx itself, look the fuck out: the mailroom is located in one of many buildings on the ramp comprised of neverending networks of conveyor belts. Sometimes the sound of the belts moving is deafening. FedEx has hundreds of locations just in Memphis. I start my days in the mailroom, and pick up and deliver to 35 of those hundreds of locations here. If you want to hear about something neat, FedEx's interoffice mail system is it.

Every bag of internal mail going from one FedEx location to another is barcoded. Those barcodes are scanned in by my PalmPilot which is running an app called PWITS (see walzgroup.com). Everything I pick up at the hub mailroom, I scan in. And as it's moved to various FedEx installations surrounding the ramp, it's scanned out. The same with everything I pick up from those locations destined elsewhere.

Think the "public" side of FedEx is cool? I guarantee you've never seen an interoffice mail system any more advanced than the one I work. Here is another post with some more information about just how detailed it gets.

Long live FedEx :)