from Hacker News

The Rise and Fall of the Cash Railway

by ductionist on 11/20/19, 7:38 AM with 15 comments

• by carapace on 11/20/19, 9:04 PM

  This is one of those things where it's like, are people just making stuff up? Like dogs "bred to run on a wheel in order to turn meat so it would cook evenly." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_Dog

• by gumby on 11/20/19, 10:40 PM

  I continue to be amazed by how much effort over the years went in to moving and managing random physical objects around (money, file folders, books, etc). There have been two parallel processes, one optimizing the process (e.g. containerization, JIT delivery, et al) the other eliminating the physical stuff (e.g. files as data, money as data etc). Both processes are at their core ones of abstraction, though all sorts of vestigial traces remain (e.g. calling directories "folders", or even the term "file").

  When I go to offices I feel that a lot of that subject matters (physical stuff) has merely been replaced by people moving data around (copying entries into a spreadsheet, for example, or writing reports). That's what we'll get rid of next and again, I believe it will be through a process of abstraction.

• by dredmorbius on 11/20/19, 8:31 PM

  high-spirited sales clerks would occasionally try to prank them by placing live mice or dead spiders inside the canisters. In-store gossip and romances could be covertly conducted by secret messages passed back and forth via the cash-carrier wires.

  Create a link between people, capable of carrying messages (or dynamic entertainments), and hijinks and love will follow.

• by Sniffnoy on 11/20/19, 10:31 PM

  After reading this article, I still don't understand what problem these were solving that is now solved by other means. Why was there a need to rapidly transport cash around the store in the first place? This apparently isn't needed anymore, so what problem existed then that no longer exists now?

  The article says cash carriers went away due to 1. pneumatic tubes, and 2. automatic counter registers. However, pneumatic tubes isn't much of an answer, because that's just a different way of rapidly transporting cash, and those are now gone as well.

  So presumably the real answer has to be these "automatic counter registers". But the article never elaborates on what those are. How does an automatic counter register differ from earlier cash registers, and why was it that without them one needed a rapid cash transport method?

• by Animats on 11/20/19, 6:25 PM

  Disneyland Paris has one of those, built by Disney Imagineering.

• by masonic on 11/21/19, 2:26 AM

  Many Costcos still have their pneumatic tubes in place.

• by pbalau on 11/20/19, 9:07 PM

  I'm fairly disappointed with the quality of discussion/things posted here, but from time to time, there is an article like this and all is good with the Universe again.