Route Reference Computer
Ferranti Canada's Route Reference Computer was the first computerized mail sorter system, delivered to the Canadian Post Office in January 1957.
Despite 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.
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.
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.
He suggested that a similar system could be used for sorting mail, but a better solution for printing the routing information would be to use "a code of vertical bars on the back of the letter.
[3] Deputy Postmaster General William Turnbull, under pressure from the seated government to improve postal service, turned to Lewis' ideas.
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 PCM radio link.
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.
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.
[10] 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.
That month, Progressive Conservative Postmaster critic William McLean Hamilton pressed for an update on "this million dollar monster",[11] and given an end-of-year date that was also missed.
The machine was finally delivered in January 1957,[11] 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.
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.
During 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.
[12] 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.
[12] Their initial failure using automation slowed the adoption of newer systems, and Canada was one of the last major western nations to introduce Postal Codes, which didn't appear until the 1970s.
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.
