The Postal Service’s fascinating history with online technology

Bloomberg Businessweek staff writer Devin Leonard is the author of a new book titled Neither Snow nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service that unveils the history of the U.S. Postal Service. In a column published on Monday he teases to some USPS experiments with email and online technology — much of which we at Technical.ly found fascinating.
It’s all too easy to think of the Postal Service as an antiquated government bureaucracy that just doesn’t “get” technology. But this narrative doesn’t take into account a complicated history of innovation and pushback at the post office. As Leonard concludes his column: “perhaps the post office’s biggest blunder was trying to embrace electronic mail too soon.”
Really?
In fact the post office first launched a quasi-email service, with the futuristic acronym E-COM, in 1982. The service was, as Leonard writes, “e-mail, with a stamp.” Sort of.
Basically it allowed Postal Service customers like banks to prepare their statements on computers (as they were already doing) and then transmit these messages to USPS computers. It was a quaint mashup of old and new:

From there, the postal service would send the messages in the blink of an eye to post offices around the country, where clerks would print them out, seal them in envelopes, and pass them on to letter carriers who would deliver them to people’s homes along with their junk mail and packages.

E-COM was shut down in 1985 because it lost a bunch of money, but that wasn’t the end of (attempted) tech innovation at the USPS.
Read on in Leonard’s piece for more on the online history of the USPS. The graphic up at the top is also bangin’.