My grandmother used to send me letters with beautiful (cursive) handwriting but completely random abbreviations and missing portions of the address. They always made it to me. The system is impressively robust.<p>Also, in the video they show a poster about keying in letters to Santa. You can actually sign up to fulfill the Christmas wishes of random children:<p><a href="https://about.usps.com/holidaynews/operation-santa.htm" rel="nofollow">https://about.usps.com/holidaynews/operation-santa.htm</a>
I was excited to learn PO box numbers are unique in my city and have their own ZIP code so theoretically mail could reach me with an address of only "37939-0002" (ZIP only) or "PO Box 2, Knoxville" (no ZIP) if someone wants to test it out. I'll send something fun in reply.
I used to have a job doing this at a different REC in the mid 2000s and we had terminals that I think were connected to some mainframe system.<p>The keyboard layout was custom for the application like they show in the video. The software would expect numbers at certain times, so you'd just type numbers using the home row and it'd switch back over the alpha chars after you input the correct number of number chars.
Recently sent mail with Tropical Coast font for addresses. Some got there in a couple days. Some are trickling in 2 weeks later. I was guessing, the auto sorter failed on a few and they had to be manually read.
Single point of failure: only one centre. Fire, flooding, earthquake or non-natural disaster would cause problems for all mail delivery throughout the US.