According to the New York Sun:  With little fanfare, the postmark (note: see picture below) Americans have been accustomed to for more than a century is quickly going the way of the telegram and the rotary dial telephone.

Last month, the postal service finished deploying new equipment nationwide that replaces the traditional circle-and-bars postage cancellation with a computer-generated city, state, and date, slapped onto mail by a high-speed ink-jet printer.

The post office began phasing in the new cancellations at regional mail processing centers last August and completed installation on all 1,083 of its state-of-the-art canceling machines a few weeks ago, she said.

  

With the demise of the traditional postmark, America is losing an icon ubiquitous in travel books, pop art, and historical memorabilia. This summer, for the first time, vacationers who send postcards home from trips across America will find their missives emblazoned not with the familiar circle indicating the geographic origin of the mail, but with two sterile lines of computer type.

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