[muawiyah]

I figure USPS bought about 250,000 (minimum) of my device at about $1,000 each. That'd be $250,000,000 over a 35 year period, or less than $10 million a year.

They avoided hiring well over 250,000 people at $40,000 per employee per year, or $10,000,000,000 perannum for an average of 17.5 years. That is a huge amount of money ~ $175,000,000,000 ~ worth just a bit more than two full years of total postal operating costs.

Frankly, I'm still mildly upset about not having gotten a special performance award for the effort ~ or maybe promotion to the top job at the age of 23 or so.

One of the problems you have with government work is that most folks involved in it actually imagine that the reason your idea was successful is that you were simply in the right place ~ not that you were a bright person who worked hard.

One of the guys who several years later created some useful enhancements to the basic device did end up as Deputy Postmaster General ~ and that was the end of his career. Bright guy; creative; but the Board of Governors has never approved of either attribute.

[Myrddin]

PacBell was a bit more fair. My salary was fairly flat, but I often got performance bonuses around $5k for those big money savers. The common data extract transmitted over Ethernet saved $30k monthly. That more than compensated for the initial installation cost of $3k per machine for the Ethernet cards. They were pretty expensive in 1986. The network opened the door to a long line of performance enhancing opportunities.