The last step in sending out a stamp ticket is to stamp it, and this Shangluo has always had it. He had a small seal for himself, the size of a fingernail, to stamp his name.

After being stamped, it will be similar to a postmark of a post office, and these stamps will be considered to have been used.

"Okay, so you can send it out. I'm telling you, it's super fun. ”

Wen Yuan took the stamped list from his hand, put it into the transfer bottle, and then aimed it at the pneumatic pipe mouth:

"Po"

The bottle was sucked in.

"This voice. It seems to be inexplicably very emotional. ”

"yes, that's it. With just one turn of the handle, you can manipulate a huge system to turn it for you. Ah~~ It's too tax evasion. It's a pity that you can only play once a month, and you can play ten coppers at a time. ”

"This thing. Expensive, right? ”

This thing is very useful at first glance. Because he is the only transportation system that can deliver "goods" between "customers and customers" "almost instantly".

There are three elements to this: customer-to-customer, almost instantaneous, and items.

Plumbing, for example, transmits electricity, not goods. Water and electricity are also not from customer to customer, and it is obviously impossible for two neighbors to use wires to generate electricity from each other; Although a phone can establish a connection between everyone, a phone can only carry information, not an item. Another example is running errands, which can pass items from customer to customer, but the speed of running errands is too slow.

The closest thing to this system is actually a fax machine. If it is documents that are to be transferred, then a fax machine is an almost perfect alternative to a pneumatic transfer system. However, what the fax machine cannot cover is the transmission of "original documents" and "other items".

Among them, the purpose of transmitting the "original documents" is mainly for encryption and mutual authentication. However, after most of it has been covered by electronic certificates and biometrics, the pneumatic transmission system is left with only one edge function called "delivery", which cannot be replaced.

However, the process of phasing out pneumatic transmission systems is far less tangled. There's nothing like replacing each other, competing with each other, and so on. It has almost just taken a step towards the end of its technological life. Only a reverie about the era of "steampunk" is left in the history of mankind.

Shang Luo felt that the most critical reason for this should be that it was too expensive. The mere fact that it is "expensive" can make the entire system inoperable.

In the "early modern period", such immature but ambitious projects were not uncommon. Such as seaplanes, airships, and so on. These technologies have been in operation for more than ten years, or even only a few years after a golden period, and then they have withdrawn from the stage of history. The reason for this was not only because of the rapid development of technology at that time, but also because human engineering was generally not so developed at that time, and there was a lack of reasonable prediction of the follow-up budget of a project.

The same goes for this pneumatic transmission system. When it was first established, its cost could be relied on and new buildings and so on, but it was not so expensive. But over time, its maintenance costs become quite outrageous and unacceptably expensive.

Then, it's gone.

"Hmm" Wen Yuan thought for a moment, "Is it expensive?" It seems to be quite expensive. ”

"Is this project roughly breaking even?"

"Sort of. But we only use the accompanying functions, and the real big customer of the pneumatic transmission system is the section from the telegraph office to the stock exchange. Well, but in recent years, there have been more and more private phone calls, and this fun system will probably slowly shrink - whatever, I've already played it anyway, and this system has been in service for decades. When the service life is up, it is not a bad thing to retire all of them. My grandmother is deploying a new switch. ”

"Switch?" Shang Luo captured this key word, "Didn't you already have a phone number before?" That's not a switch? ”

"No, those were actually flying signals before, and they were all using the spirit network to communicate. Think about it, do you have a landline phone at home? Didn't you? I have it at home. It was very expensive, because each phone line had to be manually connected at the post office, and then it had to be transferred one level at a time. Sometimes a long-distance call requires the coordination of several stations. But just last year, we figured out how to dial a phone number outside of the spirit net. ”

"Oh? How? ”

"Well, I heard from my grandmother, it's called a 'stepper switch'. I haven't seen it, but I've heard it's a machine about the size of a room. By dialing the dial, you can find the one you want to dial, the principle is this: the phone needs to be dialed by the dial, and when dialing 0 to 9, the angle and time of the dial are different. Then you go to the switch, you can identify the number, and then you go to dialing. ”

"Identifying numbers. How do you read it after that? ”

"It's complicated, but it's not incomprehensible. It's 'step-by-step' – have you ever played with a small ball machine? That's it. Layer by layer down the floor, only here it is fixed. For example, the area code of Yujing is 01, Fengjing is 02, and only these two have numbers starting with 0. Then when dialing 0, the switch will only screen the numbers in Yujing and Fengjing. The next gear, 1 is Yujing, and 2 is Fengjing. After that, it is also confirmed one level at a time, and the first one to dial 4 will screen out the number that starts with 01-4. The second digit is 5, sieve out 01-45. Then 'step' backwards one by one until the unique number is confirmed, such as 01-456789. This is a stepper switch. Why are you asking this all of a sudden? ”

"Didn't you say you had an office?"

"Oh, the East Factory."

"You call Dongchang again, believe it or not, I'm in a hurry with you."

"Okay, okay, it's not called Dongchang. What factory is here? ”

"It's not a factory. The main task of our office at present is to build a many-to-many information network for more than 1,000 qi practitioners across the country. And then."

Shang Luo paused. After that, it is more important to set up an outpost for the spread of the Internet across the country in the future, so that everyone can do "psychological construction", and then the "pure land" will come.

"I see," Wen Yuan nodded, "Then our mission is quite important." But stepper switches don't help much, it's too basic. What do you describe as the Internet, which seems to be a 'many-to-many' connection? But the stepper switch is still only a one-to-one exchange, because it can't connect multiple phone lines together, it just has one dial-up time left. ”

"Well, it seems, there is still a long way to go."

"Do you have any ready-made solutions?"

"Yes, yes. But if it's just a step swap that takes up an entire room, there's nothing else to talk about. We need something that can really improve the 'hashrate'. Do you have any clues? ”

(End of chapter)