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Pneumatic Tube Communication In Hospitals
blee37 sends along a writeup from the School of Medicine at Stanford University on their pneumatic tube delivery system, used for sending atoms not bits. Such systems are in use in hospitals nationwide; the 19th-century technology is enhancd by recent refinements in pneumatic braking. "Every day, 7,000 times a day, Stanford Hospital staff turn to pneumatic tubes, cutting-edge technology in the 19th century, for a transport network that the Internet and all the latest Silicon Valley wizardry can't match: A tubular system to transport a lab sample across the medical center in the blink of an eye."
For that matter, how much information can you send if you load up a 16-Gb USB drive (or a few) and send them off in a tube?
You have a last mile (or last metre) problem there though. Getting the data through the tube will take seconds. Minutes at most. 16GB through USB2 will take a few minutes even if you actually do get the maximum theoretical throughput.
Oh, and Roosevelt Island (in the river between Manhattan and Queens) has pneumatic garbage collection. It's the only place in the US besides Disneyworld to do that. Apparently it works somewhat-not-unlike a packet-switched network, periodically connecting garbage and recycling loads from different places to the appropriate suction via the same set of tubes.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
They are pretty common in the UK, in all sort of industries.
Tesco supermarket uses them in some stores for moving cash to tills, and they are widely used in Hospitals.
There is one great, if slightly lengthy story that a friend tells, from when she was working in a hospital in Western Scotland a few years ago, I'll try to recount it best as I can.
A patient who has Hepatitis and Epilepsy is admitted to the hospital, he had a fit, and his Dog bit his ear off while he was fitting. So he came to hospital with his ear in his pocket. He was treated in A&E (UK ER) and sent up to the surgical department. His Ear though was wrapped up and put in a tube, however before the doctor could tap in the destination, the pod whizzed off. The hepatitis positive ear was not found for several days (is this just a bit error rate?), as it was quiet a big hospital with a lot of tubes. It could have been worse, as the ear was not intended to be sown back on, but just photographed and incinerated. The doctor who put the ear in the pod was known as Stupid Dave before the incident, but I'm sure this didn't help him shake of the moniker. The worst thing is, most people just ask what happened to the dog.
You don't get that with TCP/IP
The funny thing to me is why people make fun of him at all. He is not an IT guy. In layman's terms a series of tubes is actually appropriate.
You can look at a CAT5 cable and a fiber optic cable as being a tube, and information being droplets of water. All of the fiber running across the world is essentially a series of tubes and used to transport these droplets of information from one place to another.
It is a little more complex than that of course. We have routers and switches which inspect those droplets of information and route them through other tubes, modify them, or just discard them which occurs at layers 2 and 3.
I don't think it is unreasonable or stupid to liken layer 1 infrastructure to a series of tubes. It's a pretty easy abstraction to construct if you don't have an in-depth understanding of the technology.
I used such tubes all day, every day, for several years, doing Neutron Activation Analysis. The samples were loaded three per tube, known as rabbits. They went into the slot, closed and blew down the outside wall of the building, underground, and then up into the core of our TRIGA reactor. There they got neutrons of various energies for anywhere from 0.05 to 2-3 seconds, and then they blasted back to me. Behind the shields I removed the samples and placed them at the gamma detectors--moving very fast. Counting gammas took anywhere from seconds to days, depending upon type and elements.
We proved the existence of the Northern Hemisphere ozone depletion with 800 samples, and several of my graduates got PhDs. Another project showed trade routes extant through northern Italy at the construction of the Colliseum.
Once in a while a rabbit would get stuck. A particularly hot one did, right at the corner of my lab. We timed that test so no one else was in the building, and it got so hot it wouldn't come back past the tube joint. If I hadn't known just where the 36" wrench was, the building could have been badly contaminated, and would've shut down, as in national news. I got it out without too much exposure, and was offered the job as building manager later.
Another time a sample exploded while removing it from a rabbit, showering my nose with hot dust. I still get stray hairs growing there...
The Costco in my hometown uses pneumatic tubes to deliver money to the back room, from the registers. When there's too much cash in the drawer, you take the excess, stick it in a canister, it shoots off to be counted and put in the safe. I think if somebody breaks a large bill and you're low on change, the back room could also shoot you a canister of small bills to stock up with, but I've never seen that happen.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
That is not unlike what I remember as a kid at a local department store. They didn't have cash registers, they had a table/desk with a tube endpoint on it. The clerk would take your check/money and a hand written bill and put it in the tube pod. It would shoot up to the 5 floor where the ladies handled the cash. After a short wait, a tube pod would come down with your receipt and any change you were due. It fascinated me and was always a treat to go there. It was also a treat because they had an elevator with dual doors and a guy that ran it.
Now get off my lawn!
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"