"How the US Postal Service reads terrible handwriting"

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John Gray
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"How the US Postal Service reads terrible handwriting"

Post by John Gray »

Another fascinating YouTube video from Tom Scott!

The comments contain the interesting observation that:
the American “Post Office” delivers the mail, whereas the British “Royal Mail” delivers the post.
John Gray

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HansV
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Re: "How the US Postal Service reads terrible handwriting"

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Thank you for your post (mail?)
Best wishes,
Hans

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ChrisGreaves
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Re: "How the US Postal Service reads terrible handwriting"

Post by ChrisGreaves »

John Gray wrote:
09 Aug 2022, 09:48
Another fascinating YouTube video from Tom Scott!
The comments contain the interesting observation that:
the American “Post Office” delivers the mail, whereas the British “Royal Mail” delivers the post.
Good video.
Is it my imagination, or has Tom Scott become so successful that he can now explore internationally? I thought that the bulk of his videos were based in the UK.

A benefit of being in the (amateur) chorus of Gilbert and Sullivan productions is that you get pally with a guy who works in the postal warehouse on Lakeshore Boulevard in Toronto and can invite yourself to tour the facility, which I did back in 1990/91; so 30+ years ago.

There they had sorting machines that could read typed addresses and some handwriting, although I am not sure but that the handwritten addresses had to have their generated postal code approved by humans.

"What" I asked "happens to the rejects going into that hopper?". I should add that envelopes were screaming through at a rate that reminded me of cards being read on the CDC-3300 computers.

"Oh! We feed those into the second (identical) machine and they get scanned again". "And the rejects from that second machine?". Into the third machine, which could be seen spitting out rejects.

The rejects of the third machine were fed into the first of two older models, slower than the (then) super high-speed machines.

Each pass through a machine reduced the percentage of rejects by a significant proportion - perhaps 30%.
The rejects were largely printed address, printed on bills, which could be read by humans through a window in the envelope. The windows were often too glossy and reflected too much light, which affected the scanners. So the solution was repeated passes through the four extra machines, each pass roughing-up the window to the point where the slower machines had a pretty good chance of making out the postal code.

I think that the goal was to form a valid postal code, which in Canada is ("A9A 9A9"), I think a row of houses on a single block of a street, or else a single commercial building and, for the Big Boys, a single company.

That was thirty years ago. By now they should be able to prepare the invoices for the firms! But of course The Firms are going paperless anyway ...

There were other facets - if the postal workers in another province were on strike, every other province had the data for that province, and so could pre-sort the mail for that province before sending it off by plane. I thought that was a good use of computing technology.

Cheers, Chris
An expensive day out: Wallet and Grimace