Route Reference Computer: Difference between revisions

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{{Short description|Mail sorter system}}

[[Ferranti-Packard|Ferranti Canada]]'s '''Route Reference Computer''' was the first computerized [[mail sorter]] system, delivered to the [[Canada Post|Canadian Post Office]] in January 1957. In spite ofDespite a promising start and a great deal of international attention, spiraling costs and a change in government led to the project being canceled later that year. Technical developments pioneered for the Route Reference Computer were put to good use by Ferranti in several projects that followed over the next decade.

==History==

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===Sorting problems===

In the immediate post-war era, Canada experienced explosive growth in urban population as veterans returning from [[World War II]] moved into the cities looking for work in the [[newly industrialized country]]. This created logjams at mail routing offices that handled the mail for what used to be much smaller cities. Whereas the formerly rural population spread out the sorting and delivery of mail, now sixty percent of all the mail was being sorted at only ten processing stations,<ref name=v108>Vardalas, pg. 108</ref> leading to lengthy delays and complaints that reached all the way to the [[House of Commons of Canada|House of Commons]].

[[File:Mail sorting,1951.jpg|thumb|This image shows a typical manual sorting station, in this case in [[Los Angeles]] in 1951. Mail is separated and cleaned up on the desks closest to the camera, and then sorted in the rows of pigeon holes further away.]]

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Ferranti prospered from the development effort as they adapted their new transistorized circuit design for a series of follow-on projects. Shortly after the Route Reference Computer was delivered, they were contacted by the [[Federal Reserve Bank]] to develop a similar system for check sorting that was very successful.<ref>Ball & Vardalas, pg. 243</ref> Ferranti later the same basic system as the basis of [[ReserVec]], a [[computer reservations system]] built for [[Trans Canada Airlines]] (today's [[Air Canada]]) that started full operation in October 1961, beating the more famous [[Sabre (computer system)|SABRE]]. The basic ReserVec design would later be generalized into the [[Ferranti-Packard 6000]] [[Mainframe computer|mainframe]] business computers, whose design became the basis for the [[ICT 1900 series]] of machines during the 1960s.<ref>Dornian, pg. 40</ref>

==See also==

* [[Transorma]]

* [[Multiple Position Letter Sorting Machine]]

==References==

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* John Vardalas, [https://books.google.com/books?id=S8DFZtmLziMC "The Computer Revolution in Canada: building national technological competence"], MIT Press, 2001, {{ISBN|0-262-22064-4}}

* Norman Ball and John Vardalas, "Ferranti-Packard: pioneers in Canadian electrical manufacturing", McGill-Queen's Press, 1994, {{ISBN|0-7735-0983-6}}

* David Boslaugh, [https://books.google.co.nzcom/books?id=Mi8MhzheOokC "When Computers Went to Sea"], Wiley, 2003, {{ISBN|0-471-47220-4}}

* Alan Dornian, [https://web.archive.org/web/20040925093915/http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~williams/History_web_site/World%20map%20first%20page/Canada/a2031.pdf "ReserVec: Trans-Canada Airlines' Computerized Reservation System"], ''IEEE Annals of the History of Computing'', Volume 16 Number 2 (1994), pp.&nbsp;31–42

{{refend}}