In my town, they deliver it to your post office box and you have to go to the post office to pick it up. If it’s a parcel that is too big for the box, you have to go to to the window to pick it up. If the parcel is for someone else, you could just refuse to accept it and let the postmaster figure out what to do with it.
I have known people who can go six months to a year between trips to the mailbox. When one guy I know in one small town in New Mexico gets a jury notice, the postmaster calls him on the telephone to tell him so that he can come pick it up.
You used to be able to be able to get the full zip code and zip+4 directories on 9-track reels of magnetic tape to load in your own computers to do your own validation. The data set was free.
The zip code directory was on one tape and I could handle that. On the other hand, the entire zip+4 code directory took something like 95 9 track tapes.
I know that this system has caused some miss-deliveries to my address, because I was able to recreate the error. What happens is the person starts entering their address, but with a typo, and the autocomplete provides my address, which they uncritically accept.
On the whole, I think the automatic address completion is good, but the error condition is replacing a nonsense address with a perfectly valid, but incorrect, address.
95 9-track tapes from back in the day will hold about 8GB. The smallest thumbdrive Amazon sells will hold that. For $8.00 delivered tomorrow.
The modern API is a heck of a lot better because USPS is responsible for keeping the backing data up to date. You’re always querying the good stuff, not last year’s stale stuff.
We once lived in a two-mile square suburb with a Dogwood Lane, a Dogwood Terrace and a Dogwood Court. They were not adjacent; actually on opposite sides of the town. I have no idea what the developers (I’m told they get to pick the street names for new developments) were thinking. The regular mail carrier knew what went where but if he was out, there was no telling who got whose mail.
My husband ordered me a new bowling ball for Christmas. It got delivered to the wrong Dogwood address. The very nice people who lived there brought it by and dropped it off. Regular mail is one thing but personal delivery of a bowling ball was going above and beyond IMO.
We had a PDP-11/34 at the time. I don’t think the disk drive was larger than 100 or 150 megabytes.
There were different tape densities. On the PDP-11, there were 800 bits per inch and 1600 bits per inch. I am pretty sure that ours was 800 bits per inch. Total capacity of one tape was around 20 megabytes.
By the way, have you ever heard the term “bit juice”?
One interesting thing about the magnetic tapes was that you could read past the end of the tape, but it seemed like hardly anyone knew that.
At an engineering company I was working at, someone handed me a tape of a sample output set from a company that provided a service to several companies alike in the region. We were considering having them do the same service at the engineering company.
So one evening, I mounted the tape and read the tape to get the data and save it. Then, instead of rewinding and unmounting the tape, I read past the end of tape marks and found a list (the first part was obvoiusly cut out, but not a much of it) of every customer they had in the region including the business name, the manager’s name, the business address, the business telephone number, and the number of employees at the business.
From then on, when I needed to send a tape to someone, I would first write over the entire tape with random patterns, rewind it, and then copy the files to the tape that I needed to send.
Oh yeah, tape reuse was a thing. As was inadvertent data disclosure.
I was assuming the 9-track takes you were talking about were IBM mainframe tapes. Which I worked with back in the day.
These improved from 200-ish BPI to 800 to 1600 to eventually a whopping 6250 bytes per inch! 75KB per foot of tape! Woot!1!
And came in a 1600 foot length on a single reel that could theoretically hold 120MB. But the inter-record and inter-dataset gaps wasted a good 20%-30% of the length of every tape; the shorter the records the worse the wastage. So 100MB was a decent but optimisitc rule of thumb for per-tape capacity.
