Route Reference Computer: Difference between revisions

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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|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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==References==

{{refbegin}}

* John Vardalas, [http://books.google.com/books?id=S8DFZtmLziMC "The Computer Revolution in Canada: building national technological competence"], MIT Press, 2001, ISBN 02622206440-262-22064-4

* Norman Ball and John Vardalas, "Ferranti-Packard: pioneers in Canadian electrical manufacturing", McGill-Queen's Press, 1994, ISBN 07735098360-7735-0983-6

* David Boslaugh, [http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=Mi8MhzheOokC "When Computers Went to Sea"], Wiley, 2003, ISBN 04714722040-471-47220-4

* Alan Dornian, [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

{{refend}}