Comments by "vk2ig" (@vk2ig) on "V-Mail - WW2 Email" video.

  1.  @TheAllMightyGodofCod  Yep ... certainly not the rotational axis of the Earth. :)
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  2. It certainly was a leader in its field back in the day ... but ideology blinded them to the realities of the CCD and hence the digital camera.
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  3. Carried via TCP/IP - The Carrier Pigeon / In-flight Protocol.
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  4. That logistics didn't have the timeliness component that mail did. If you're holding two months worth of ink, envelopes, paper, film, etc, and the monthly supply ship gets in three weeks late then that's OK. But if the ship carrying the snail mail arrives three weeks late then that's not OK ... V-mail fixed the timeliness side of it - allowing all those "letters" to be carried very quickly by air; while probably increasing the amount of non-time-critical materiel required to be shipped by surface freight.
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  5. I cannot see Dr. Felton selling out like that. Can you even begin to imagine him letting someone else dictate the editorial content of his videos?
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  6.  @IronGolem2009  We haven't owned a TV since all the stations went digital here in Australia. Everyone watches stuff on their device these days. Not watching TV - and thus denying their advertisers' access to my family's disposable income - feels like a great "up yours" to all the TV station program directors of the past who used to dictate what we could and couldn't watch. Absolute power corrupts, and those program directors used to drink their own bathwater.
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  7.  @jansix4287  That reminds me of a British tabloid press headline in the mid-90s when they were agitating for the UK to leave the EU. "The last time Britain went into Europe successfully was 6th June 1944." :D
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  8.  @TheAllMightyGodofCod  Yes, I know that, and have done for years. But I suspect you have only discovered this fact a few days ago.
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  9. Many kids nowadays are not taught to write in cursive. It looks like some sort of code when they see it. :)
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  10.  @JohnRodriguesPhotographer  The Battle Of Stalingrad is a case in point ... when the logistics tail fails, soldiers go hungry and run out of munitions.
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  11.  @CFarnwide  The amount of materiel the Allies - especially the USA - moved around the Pacific theatre is amazing. Second to that is the amazing amount of materiel they left behind, because it was too expensive to return it to the country of origin. Alby Mangels visited Palmyra Island during his Pacific trip in the 70s/80s and filmed driving around in a truck he and the crew got going, and explored the supply dump left behind from WW2. I have a photo of my grandfather in uniform assisting a civilian auctioneer when preparing to sell off a warehouse full of truck engines from the USA. And there's the stories of numbers of US aircraft dumped from aircraft carriers off Sydney.
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  12. Dear John, your John Deere tractor broke down so I've left it for a Ford. Yours, Nancy.
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  13. I think your comment "take over loads of blank paper and envelopes in a lull in deliveries" is the key. One very important aspect of mail to/from home is timeliness. V-mail not only assisted with reducing the amount of paper carried on aircraft, it also assisted with speeding up delivery. However; a shipload of paper and envelopes for printing V-mail can arrive every so often to replenish the supplies without as big an emphasis on timely arrival; i.e. if you have 2 months worth of stock on-hand, and the ship is scheduled to arrive every month, then it arriving late by a couple of weeks won't cause a problem.
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  14.  @AnthonyHandcock  Maybe the OP would like Montana to be The Mouse That Roared, so when it's defeated the rest of the USA can pump trillions of dollars into it ... resulting in an economic miracle?
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  15. The Salvation Army were very good that way, providing the materials for free.
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  16.  @dondon-wg9ft  But they for an even stranger reason they couldn't capitalise on the digital camera taking over from the film camera. It's almost like they couldn't appreciate the viewpoint of the average consumer (their customer) - would they rather have instant pictures which could be easily shared and stored, or would they rather wait until 36 pictures have been taken, and then pay extra to produce hardcopies?
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  17.  @hughmungus1767  Especially if the letters contained classified information ... can't let that stuff fall into enemy hands!
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  18. How many photographs of letters on 16mm film can you get into an ounce?
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  19. The USA was a different country back then. The only similarity nowadays is the name.
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  20.  @sadams12345678  Some of the parts catalogs, etc, at work are JPEGs of 35mm microfilm. :D
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  21. That's an amazing story, thanks for sharing! I wonder how many other couples got together due to a random letter from some girl back home?
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  22. Remarkable! I really like these videos highlighting the technology of the time. Thanks for posting this one.
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  23. The other problem with cellphones in the military is when the soldiers, etc, leave the position reporting systems enabled ... you can see on social media where they go and when. :)
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  24.  @WhatIsYourMalfunction  And depending on who they listen to, they'll believe the US government did it or some terrorists did it. Amazing that the USA has come to this ... it's certainly not the same country as they one us non-Americans used to look up to decades ago.
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  25.  @anthony7489  Die Glocke ...
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  26.  @bigfoot163  Miss information? I guess if the conservatives owned the media it would be Mister information?
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  27. BIt hard to talk between two continents without telephone or radio, though. So letters were important, too.
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  28. Yep, they are. Kodak was certainly multinational, and produced film used worldwide.
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  29. Hitler sent plenty of V "mail" to Churchill during the war.
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  30. Service persons deployed in Vietnam could access the MARS station if there was one on their base. This was the Military Auxiliary Radio System where amateur radio operators in the USA would connect their radios to the telephone system and set up "phone patch" calls from the overseas MARS station to the people being called in The States. It wasn't completely private (the call goes over HF radio and the radio operators in the stations at both ends can hear it), but it was a means of talking to people back home.
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  31. Necessity is the Mother of Invention ... maybe there's not enough "necessity" nowadays?
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  32. And nowadays it's E-mail ...
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  33.  @vehiclesofpeace  And what about it? It's a normal practice during wartime. What are you going to do about it - sue the people involved? :D
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  34. Nothing like getting a pound cake, pudding, or some other delicacy via mail ... :D
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  35. Reasonably low loss, too!
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  36. It also trades timeliness of mail for non-critical timeliness of the supplies needed to keep the V-mail going. As I've suggested elsewhere in comments; a base may hold two weeks of V-mail supplies (ink, paper, film) but if the weekly ship arrives a few days late that's OK; but it result in the troops' mail arriving late, which is very important.
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  37. "Hold the phone around here!"
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  38. You're missing the point that Dr. Felton made right up front regarding why V-mail was created. It's the timeliness issue that mattered. Deployed servicepersons wanted timely mail. V-mail solved that problem by reducing the weight of mail to be carried on aircraft, thus allowing more mail to be carried on the fastest transport means available. The supplies needed to make V-mail work had to be provided, but that could be sent by ship / train / truck (i.e. the surface transport distribution system). For example, a given base might a month of stock of V-mail supplies. If the fortnightly ship carrying (among other things) V-mail supplies arrived a week late then that wasn't a disaster. And considering there was film stock involved as well, the weight of supplies needed increased ... but again, that wasn't time-critical, whereas mail to/from home was time critical to maintain morale.
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  39. Especially with an almost lossless compression system like that. And if they'd had the bandwidth, they could've sent them as faxes, too.
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