Commerce is well known in the New York area for consumer-friendly services like weekend banking hours and coin-sorting machines.

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By the mid-1980s new technology meant the codes could be read automatically by sorting machines with no human intervention.

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Royal Mail started to use the alphanumeric codes when electronic sorting machines were introduced to speed up the service in the 1950s.

BBC: Modern postcodes are 50 years old

Three years ago Matsunaga summoned the courage to tell officials of the labyrinthine agricultural bureaucracy that he wanted to sell half his crop to wholesalers whose sorting machines could do the burdensome packing.

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