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 [[Canadian House of Commons of Canada|House of Commons]].

[[ImageFile: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.]]

At the time, a mail sorter could be expected to sort mail into one of about two dozen "[[Pigeon-hole messagebox|pigeon holes]]", small bins that collected all of the mail being delivered to a particular mail route. The sorter had to memorize addresses and the routes that served them, reading the address off a letter and placing it into the correct pigeon hole. In a small town each pigeon hole could represent the mail carried by a single deliveryman, and each sorter could remember the streets and sort mail for any of these routes. But for mail that was being delivered across larger areas, the sorting had to be broken into a hierarchy. A receiving station in Alberta routing a letter to Ontario would sort it into the Ontario stack. The mail would then be received in Ontario and sorted at a distribution center to stacks for city or towns. If the city was large enough, it might have to be sorted several more times before it reached an individual carrier.

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As chance would have it, Levy had recently been fired by ITT and was hired by Turnbull. He set up the small in-house Electronics Laboratory with the promise of having a prototype machine ready for testing in three years. In early 1953 he visited companies looking for potential development partners, and through this process he met with Arther Porter, head of R&D at Ferranti Canada.

At the time, Ferranti was in the midst of developing the [[DATAR]] system for the [[Royal Canadian Navy]]. DATAR was a [[vacuum tube]]-based [[drum memory]] computer that stored and collected data for display. Radar and sonar operators on any of the ships in a convoy could send contact reports to DATAR using a [[trackball]]-equipped display that sent the data over a [[UHF]] [[pulse code modulation|PCM]] radio link. DATAR stored the data on the drum and periodically sent out the complete dataset to the ships, which plotted them on local displays, rotated and scaled for that ship's position in the convoy. The result was a single unified picture of the entire battlefield that could be seen on any of the ships, even those without direct contact with the targets.<ref>Boslaugh, pg. 42</ref>

Porter suggested using the DATAR computer design as the basis for a sorting system. Following Lewis' suggestion, a new reader would sort the mail on the basis of the pattern of stripes on the letter provided by an operator who simply typed in the address without attempting to route it. Ferranti suggested a fluorescent ink instead of a conductive one. Routing information would be placed on the magnetic drum, which could store thousands of routes and could be easily changed on demand. Levy, however, was interested in using an optical memory system being developed at IBM by a team including [[Louis Ridenour]] (see [[Automatic Language Translator]] for details) for storage of the routing information. Turnbull overruled Levy, and on 10 August 1954 he signed a contract with Ferranti for the '''Electronic Information Handling System''' using a drum memory.<ref>Vardalas, pg. 114</ref>

In February 1955 Levy announced the system to the world at a conference in the U.S., claiming that it was able to process 200,000 letters per hour. For comparison, the largest Transnorma systems could handle about 15,000 letters an hour. Although the computer system did appear to be able to meet this claim, they were having serious problems with the non-computer portions of the project.<ref name=v115>Vardalas, pg. 115</ref>

===Route Reference Computer===

Levy and Turnbull pressed for development of a production system, while Porter was suggested they move to a [[transistor|transistorized]]ized version of the computer. Porter had made the same proposal to the Navy in order to cure the size and reliability problems they were having the tube-based DATAR, and had signed a contract for a transistorized DATAR in early 1955. Since the Navy was paying for much of the development of the circuitry, the new machine would be inexpensive to develop. Porter offered a $65,000 contract for the new computer, known as the '''Route Reference Computer''', which Turnbull signed in August 1955.<ref name=v115/>

Ferranti had based both proposals on Philco's SB-100 transistor and their Transac logic circuit design. In production both proved to be less developed than hoped. The SB-100 was unreliable, and even working versions varied so widely in performance that the Transac logic circuits were unusable. Making matters worse, in late 1955 the Navy was forced to cancel development of the transistorized DATAR, placing the entire development cost on the Post Office budget. Ferranti burned through the initial $65,000 by early 1956, and several additional rounds of funding followed. Since the Post Office had no other plans on the books to address their problems, these were always forthcoming.<ref>Vardalas, pg. 115-117</ref>

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By August 1956 the project was three times its original budget, and when Turnbull demanded an update, Ferranti finally told Levy about the problems they were having with the Transac circuitry and stated they had been forced to abandon it to develop their own. Their new design worked, but the equivalent circuits were larger and this caused problems trying to fit them into the original chassis. Levy, reporting back, was admonished by Turnbull, who was under increasing pressure to deliver the system. That month, [[Progressive Conservative Party of Canada|Progressive Conservative]] Postmaster critic [[William McLean Hamilton]] pressed for an update on "this million dollar monster",<ref name=v117>Vardalas, pg. 117</ref> and given an end-of-year date that was also missed.

The machine was finally delivered in January 1957,<ref name=v117/> and Turnbull was able to display it in working fashion that summer when the [[Universal Postal Union]] held its Congress meeting in Ottawa, the first in Canada. Interest was high, prompting postmasters from England and Germany to visit Ottawa to see the system, along with a similar visit by several U.S. Congressmen. Hopes of international sales were dimmed when the Congressmen returned to Washington and quickly arranged $5 million in funding for local development of a similar system.<ref name=v118>Vardalas, pg. 118</ref> [[Burroughs Corporation]] won a development contract the next year,<ref>James Cortada, [httphttps://books.google.com/books?id=Iws7Trv_VdEC "The Digital Hand: How computers changed the work of American public sector industries"], Oxford University Press US, 2007, pg. 168</ref> emerging as the [[Multiple Position Letter Sorting Machine]] in the early 1960s.

By this point the budget for development had reached $2.5 million. During [[1957 Canadian federal election, 1957|1957 federal election]] the [[Progressive Conservative Party of Canada]] ran a campaign that aimed at what they characterized as [[Louis St. Laurent]]'s out-of-control spending. Nevertheless, when Hamilton took over the role of Postmaster General in August 1957, instead of canceling the project he pressed Turnbull to install a production system as quickly as possible. Turnbull stated that they could have a system installed within six months, and Hamilton agreed to continue funding the project, but noted that he would accept no further delays.<ref name=v118/>

Turnbull's estimate proved overly optimistic, and development of the mechanical portions of the system dragged on until further funding was curtailed and Levy's Electronics Laboratory was finally shut down. Turnbull quit the Deputy position in 1958.<ref name=v118/> Their initial failure using automation slowed the adoption of newer systems, and Canada was one of the last major western nations to introduce [[Postal Code]]s, which didn't appear until the 1970s.<ref>"Postal Code", ''The Globe and Mail'', 20 February 1970</ref>

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Although the mail sorting machine was eventually broken up for scrap, it was highly influential outside of Canada. Lewis' original suggestion that some sort of invisible or see-through ink be used to store routing information on the front face of the letters is now practically universal, as is the basic workflow of the address being converted to [[bar code]] form as soon as possible by typists and then sent into automated machinery for actual sorting.<ref>"Mail-sorting system reads typed addresses", ''Electronics'', Volume 51 (1978), pg. 61</ref><ref>"Mail Sorting", ''Product Engineering'', Volume 39 (1968), pg. 67</ref> Use of bar-coded ZIP codes printed directly at the sending point when using [[postage meter]]s became mandatory in the U.S. in 1973.<ref>"Code of Federal regulations", U.S. Federal Register Division, 1974, pg. 191</ref> During the 1960s the use of [[optical character reader]]s replaced typists for letters with typewritten addresses, and in the 1990s, handwritten ones as well.

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 alsoReferences==

===Citations===

* [[Transorma]]

* [[Multiple Position Letter Sorting Machine]]

==Notes==

{{reflist}}

==References=Bibliography===

{{refbegin}}

* John Vardalas, [httphttps://books.google.com/books?id=S8DFZtmLziMC "The Computer Revolution in Canada: building national technological competence"], MIT Press, 2001, {{ISBN 0262220644|0-262-22064-4}}

* Norman Ball and John Vardalas, "Ferranti-Packard: pioneers in Canadian electrical manufacturing", McGill-Queen's Press, 1994, {{ISBN 0773509836|0-7735-0983-6}}

* David Boslaugh, [httphttps://books.google.co.nzcom/books?id=Mi8MhzheOokC "When Computers Went to Sea"], Wiley, 2003, {{ISBN 0471472204|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. 31-42&nbsp;31–42

{{refend}}

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{{refend}}

[[Category:Ferranti computers]]

[[Category:Transistorized computers]]