[ale] I need one of these

[Alex Carver]

My dad used to work in the statement printing/mailing area of one of the 
credit card companies.  He gave me a tour many years ago of a new 
facility that had been put together.  They had purchased a new 200,000 
square foot, climate controlled warehouse and outfitted it with 
everything required.  There were 10 printers set up.  These were color 
lasers by Oce which printed on 1-ton rolls at insane speeds.  It printed 
tracking barcodes in the margins so the downstream machines could track 
what was passing by.  The printers fed directly into the bursting 
machine to cut them into pages then directly into the envelope inserter 
to fold and stuff them into envelopes.  Right before folding the 
inserter cut the margins off the pages and vacuumed up the scrap.  All 
the scraps and dust in any machine were vacuumed away to a shredder that 
dumped into a 55-foot trailer for recycling.

The inserter fed the envelopes directly into a postage meter and then a 
USPS sorter.  They had their own USPS Post Master on site to certify the 
outgoing mail.  The sorter dropped the envelopes into the white plastic 
USPS bins and the binning machine piped into a pallet auto-loader which 
stacked the bins, wrapped them and got them ready to load onto another 
55-foot trailer.  They went straight to the airport after that since 
they were all now certified letters.


I forget how many trailers a day headed out of there but there were at 
least 20 trailer bays on the back of the building.  They got rid of the 
facility a few years ago as more people switched to email statement 
delivery but what they had at the time was impressive.

Everything was set up from the very beginning for maximum up-time and 
redundancy (a rarity for most places).  They had a battery bank on the 
roof for a whole-building UPS system that could hold them for a few 
hours and a set of four Jet-A fueled turbine generators for continuous 
power.  There was a tank underground in the truck bay area and an 
attachment point where tanker trucks could come in and connect directly 
to the fuel supply.  The generators could feed directly from the tankers 
if needed.

The whole place was so efficient they had only 20-30 employees total 
including security and custodial services.

On 2020-09-22 09:21, Jim Kinney via Ale wrote:
> And toner from a 55 gallon drum.
> 
> I once saw a commercial credit card statement printing rig. Throughput was measured in linear feet per second and that number had almost 3 digits. Wide carriage dot matrix that was a head the full width of the paper path so no movement required except by the paper. Paper delivered by forklift.
> At around 90 feet per second the refold was by air jets.
> I was asked to fix the serial port connection feeding one of these. Testing wasted at least a tree. Finally found rodent damage in a wall. The other printers were next to fail. Reran new wires through a 3" steel conduit in the wall and capped off. Swapped over each end and got paid. Got called back when they switched to ethernet from serial. They were super happy I had run cat 5 as the change was new ends plus a switch.
> 
> On September 22, 2020 11:59:15 AM EDT, Solomon Peachy via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 22, 2020 at 11:51:09AM -0400, Jim Kinney via Ale wrote:
>>> Or 20 rpi4....
>>
>> I currently have *26* printers plugged into one of my systems.
>>
>> ....No matter how many ports there are, it won't be enough.
>>
>> - Solomon
>> -- 
>> Solomon Peachy			      pizza at shaftnet dot org (email&xmpp)
>>                                      @pizza:shaftnet dot org   (matrix)
>> High Springs, FL                      speachy (freenode)
> 
> 
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