. . . is quite the buzz word here in the (self-proclaimed) tech capital of the world. I won’t cast judgment on those who work in the industry. By all accounts it is keeping San Francisco from becoming nothing but a tourist town. That’s another topic.

I was doing a crossword puzzle this morning and the clue was ‘Postal area’. The answer was ‘zone’. I thought that was interesting since the US hasn’t had postal zones since the introduction (innovation!) of Zip codes in the 1960s. It struck me that that is an innovation that is wildly successful. No one thinks twice about it and it just works.

I have a vague memory of watching a TV show many years ago. It was probably the ’60s. I think it must have been ‘What’s My Line’ because the guest turned out to be the inventor of the Zip code system. When he was revealed at the end, there was some ribbing about it. Maybe that was the schtick; I wasn’t sensitive to such things then, but I certainly got the sense that mainstream America thought Zip codes were another one of those newfangled things we could do without.

On a tangent, thinking about innovation and game shows of the ’60s, I remember that a common prize on those shows was an ‘Amana RadarRange’. When the contestant won it, there was the usual extolling of its virtues. It all went over my head. Even as a science-oriented person in, say, 1965, I couldn’t comprehend how an oven could be like radar. Of course, now I realize they were talking about a microwave oven. I suppose somewhere someone did a thesis on the moment that product became mainstream in America. I’m going to let it pass. Clearly another innovation success story, though.