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Denver Airport Automated Baggage System Abandoned
cherylchase writes "Denver International Airport opened in 1995 with an ambitious fully automated baggage system: 26 miles of underground track, thousands of small gray carts, all controlled by a mainframe programmed for just in time delivery. But the system never worked well; bugs delayed the airport's opening for months (at $1M/day). The system has now been abandoned as a cost cutting measure." From the article: "Technology, too, has brought change. Back then, the big-brained mainframe doing it all from command central was the model of high tech. Today the very idea of it sounds like a cold-war-era relic, engineers say. Decentralization and mobile computing technology have taken over just about everything, allowing airlines, warehouse operators and shippers like FedEx to learn with just a few clicks the whereabouts of an item in motion, a feature that was supposed to be a chief strength of the baggage system."
I can see it now. A bunch of guys staring at their PDAs wondering why the luggage sitting in front of them isn't going anywhere. On a side note, anyone else ever want to ride those tracks a la Toy Story 2?
suck my ping!
When's the opening of the electronica club that is replacing it?
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
It's bad when your luggage is stuck in an infinite loop and the airport can't claim that the luggage was lost when it whizes by.
1) Everyone knows that mainframes are obsolete.
2) Mainframes can't defend themselves while being scapegoats.
Now they employ thousands of little grey bug eyed people to push the little grey carts around the 26 miles of dark underground tracks...
Oh well, what the hell...
They should have built the airport in downtown Denver.
A few years ago, K-Mart introduced automated checkouts (with all the buzz words of "convenience", "automatic", "quick"). It caused a lot of problems. The solution: K-Mart started putting notices that said, "To improve customer service, we are opeing more checkout lanes with a cashier" (the same ones that they closed earlier). In MBA speak, they have made two "improvements" in a space of a year!
S
... mental note
be
more
careful
of
the
word
PROTOTYPE
I took a picture of my punk rock cousin standing next to a mural of a soldier in a gas mask stabbing a white dove in the ass with what looks like a scimitar. Freakin weird. Who on earth would paint such a thing in the airport??