Linux delivers for U.S. Postal Service

Linux-based scanning machines speed mail sorting in 250 facilities.

While many businesses are just now turning to Linux as a server platform, the technology has delivered for the U.S. Postal Service for several years.

The Postal Service has used penguin power since 1999 to streamline the "snail mail" process. More than 900 Linux machines currently sort in excess of 670 million pieces of mail per day in the Postal Service's 250 mail-sorting sites around the country.

"Linux has been working well for us for some time now," says Jasbir Sandhu, electronics engineer at for the USPS, who oversaw this automation project at the USPS. "It's very stable, and the cost is excellent."

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While many businesses are just now turning to Linux as a server platform, the technology has delivered for the U.S. Postal Service for several years.

The Postal Service has used penguin power since 1999 to streamline the "snail mail" process. More than 900 Linux machines currently sort in excess of 670 million pieces of mail per day in the Postal Service's 250 mail-sorting sites around the country.

"Linux has been working well for us for some time now," says Jasbir Sandhu, electronics engineer at for the USPS, who oversaw this automation project at the USPS. "It's very stable, and the cost is excellent."

Computers have sorted mail at the Postal Service since the 1980s, when electronic scanning systems were first installed. Those systems were based on proprietary optical character recognition (OCR) hardware that was controlled by a Digital Equipment VAX system.

This improved efficiency at the Postal Service, Sandhu says, but the systems still only handled about half the mail that came into the Postal Service's facilities. By the mid-1990s, "we needed a system that did a better job than that," he says.

Part of the problem was that the old system was difficult to modify and upgrading it was expensive because the computers used many hard-wired components for running OCR algorithms.

"That's why we went looking for a software-based system instead," Sandhu says. "We looked at some Unix-based systems, but they were too expensive in terms of licensing. As for Windows, there weren't any OCR applications that could be ported to that environment."

The Postal Service put out several bids and chose Pacific Northwest Software as its integration contractor. That's where Linux technology came in.

"The decision to use Linux was fairly straightforward," says John Taves, principal with Pacific Northwest, who was involved with the USPS project.

"A big plus with Linux is you don't have to worry about licensing," Taves says. "When programming with a commercial operating system, you usually can't get the source code, and you can't talk to the developers. With Linux, if there are questions or problems, you just get into a chat room, there's usually someone who will help you work things out."

The low licensing costs and the ability to develop Linux code quickly allowed Pacific Northwest to deliver a system that fit the USPS's needs and budget, Taves says.

"I had never heard of it before," Sandhu says. "But when we were introduced to [Linux], it looked perfect for our application."