Today's story is more about history than technology.
The author, Stuart N. Brotman, was a "special assistant to the President’s principal communications policy adviser from 1978-81." So I guess he knows what he's talking about.
The sub-title of his article is "A short history of the Postal Service's long relationship with electronic mail."
If it looks interesting, take a peek to this illustration by Matthew Bouchard. Imagine these mailboxes in your cities...
Here are some excerpts of the article.
Imagine that the U.S. Postal Service was in charge of e-mail. Sound absurd? It does to most people until they realize that it almost happened.
The Postal Service had considered electronic mail ever since the invention of the telegraph. The 1845 telegraph line between DC and Baltimore was operated by the Post Office Department, which urged that the government run the telegraph system. A provision in the telegraph legislation of 1866 authorized the government to purchase existing telegraph plants after 1871.
But only after 1971, when the U.S. Post Office Department was replaced by the newly-formed U.S. Postal Service (USPS), did the Postal Service look hard at e-mail as an opportunity. The argument for USPS authority in electronic mail service stemmed from the rather broad provisions of the Postal Reform Act of 1970. The act required the Postal Service to "promote modern and efficient operations and [avoid] any practice which restricts the user of new equipment or devices which may reduce the cost or improve the quality of postal services..."
In January 1982, my worst fears concerning the Postal Service began to unfold when it introduced Electronic Computer-Originated Mail. E-COM was a message system designed to serve volume mailers, such as Shell Oil and Merrill Lynch, by generating mail from data stored electronically. The service rolled out to 25 post offices and transmitted the messages to other cities, which then transformed them into hard copy and delivered them within two days.
Luckily, this E-COM venture stopped almost immediately when the Postmaster General of the United States, William F. Bolger, wrote that "the Postal Service [is] prohibited by law from entering the ‘Generation III’ (terminal-to-terminal) business. That aspect is the proper domain of the telecommunications industry. Our mandate for 206 years has been the delivery of hard-copy messages. That will remain our function."
Source: Stuart N. Brotman, MIT Technology Review, July 29, 2002
6:23:59 PM
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