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."

Comments

Fools !

[truckaxle]

They tried going to the moon first without first getting a capsule in orbit. Classic example of a too large a leap without the necessary prototyping with too much up front design. An old saying sums it up "If you want to grind a mirror to build a 6 inch telescope it is faster to first build a 4 inch."