“Without ZIP CODE the growing U.S. Mail load would move at a snail’s pace — if it moved at all!”: an advertisement from Life, November 22, 1968.
Poor Mr. ZIP: he lived to see all mail become snail mail. The Oxford English Dictionary traces snail mail — “the physical delivery of mail, as by the postal service, considered as slow in comparison to electronic mail; a letter, etc., sent by post” — back to 1982. Mr. ZIP retired in 1986. He later died of a broken heart.
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Someday children will be astonished to hear that, back in the old days, if you wanted to communicate with someone you'd write down what you had to say on a piece of paper, put that inside something called an "envelope," then put that (after licking it, so it'd stay shut) in a "mailbox," so that, if all went well, it would be delivered a few days later to that person's home, where it would be opened and read and (it would be hoped) responded to.
There are a few of us hoary old letter-writers still extant. Future headline: Last Living Letter-writer Dies...
ZIP: Zone Improvement Plan
Informative article at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_code
As a part-time Postal service employee, let me just say that the Postal Service itself may be going the way of Mr. Zip.
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