Sometime between 1990 and 1995 the Internet "started," at least in a publicly accessible form. Before that the mail, plain old snail mail, was the important way to get information. Letters, bills, brochures, offers, catalogs, all came by mail. And, on the front of each mailed piece an address with, of course, a name. The name, you hoped, of someone very, very interested in the contents of that mail.
Now 1990 is not very long ago but it's long enough to make a few things obsolete. Back then if you had many envelopes to mail you used labels. They were typically called Cheshire labels, after the company that made them (Cheshire had been bought by Xerox in 1967). This was a long strip of paper that went into various kinds of printing machines. Some were computer printers, but not all. Remember, Cheshire belonged to Xerox, the photocopy people. And, it is only in recent times that computers became cheap.
In one such system, the names and addresses were kept on Punched Cards. The Punched Card was part of early "computer" and "sorting" systems. It was a card about 7" x 3" and you could punch holes in them. The holes could be read or detected by a sorting machine. In the Cheshire/Xerox system, the name and address was typed on the card and punches were made that indicated something interesting: The number of orders, the latest order date, the type of things the customer was interested in and so forth. And you filed these in big racks, one card per customer. Your file could be thousands, or tens of thousands, or even millions of cards, each representing a name and address: a customer, a prospect, a suspect.
When you wanted to contact some of those people, you told the sorter what to look for. And so the cards were selected to give you the right people in the right place, with the right interests. (Yes, it is much easier since we developed databases on the computer. You can't imagine how much easier it is now.) What you ended up with was a giant stack of cards.Your Names On Fire.
But you have to get the names from the cards onto the labels. You could type them (typewriter? what's that?) but that would take a really long time. Remember, Cheshire was owned by Xerox. The photocopy outfit. We had a special super Xerox machine that copied the names and addresses from the cards to the labels, in a jiffy (well, a long jiffy, but faster than typing). And this machine, in use just a few years ago, is by now so obsolete that I couldn't find a picture of it, even on the Internet (imagine that, it's true, not even on the Internet). I drew this one.
If you have ever made a photocopy, you know that copies come out nice and warm. Imagine thousands of copies in a machine that runs continuously for hours on end. That machine is going to get warm, very warm. In fact, sometimes the labels burst into flames. And there you are: Names On Fire.
Yes, it really did happen that way, every time we mailed a catalog.
Think about that, just a few years ago we were using a technology that many people have never heard of. We used it to send mail which, in a few years, may be nearly as obsolete. And using it started fires. It turned out that some of that technology was an evolutionary dead end. Even so, many people probably continued using it for years, I am certain.
Obsolete ways can be as much a "network effect" or "ecosystem" as anything else. They can last a long time if a lot of people continue to earn a living supporting them - even if they don't work as well, or cost more, than the alternatives. It may be a challenge to rid ourselves of some newly obsolete ways...
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair
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