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At the time, the primary constraint for the number of pigeon holes a sorter could serve was the length of the human arm, which limited the stack of holes to a cabinet about 4 feet on a side. A number of companies sold sorting equipment that overcame this by moving the mail on a conveyor to a large array of bins. One of the most widely used at that time was the [[Transorma]], which supported up 5 sorters at a time and sorted to as many as 300 destination bins. In practice, the Transorma simply changed the limiting problem; while the number of bins was now essentially unlimited, there was no way the sorters could be expected to remember so many routes. The limitation changed from physical to mental.<ref name=v108/>
Convinced that automation was the proper solution to the routing problem, in 1951 O.D. Lewis at Post Office headquarters in [[Ottawa]] started looking for ways to solve the memory limitation. Although Lewis did not have a technical background, he was aware of the [[IBM]] systems being used for tallying pencil-marked [[
He imagined a system where the address would simply be typed into the system and converted to barcode with no attempt by the operator to do any routing. A machine, with practically unlimited memory, would then read the route and sort it to the proper bin. Only the machine would have to know the routes, and with enough memory, any one of them could sort mail directly to its destination. Lewis noted that such a system would replace sorters with typists, which could be hired in great numbers from existing [[typing pool]]s.<ref name=v107/>
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