Manchester - The Early Days of Wincor. 

I have just been scanning through some of the jpg images that I have built up of Wincor-Nixdorf material. Apart from including the material on my websites (wincoralbum1, 2, 3 and pmechuk), I haven't done much with it although I have made a start in writing up the story so far. My problem is the amount of data that I have in electronic form. I hate having to switch from one electronic document to another. I suppose that I am a bit of a Luddite preferring hard copies.

I lived in Manchester for while and was fortunate enough to be able to obtain examples of the Spring Garden kiosks from a few days after installation up to just after the change over from the "Horizon" style post and go labels to the "Smart Stamp" format. My handwritten notes are penciled on the sheets illustrated.

The earliest usage was around the 12th May 2009 but I did not stumble across the installation until the 14th. The image below shows first class faststamps from that initial week. Note that each receipt has the Post Office oval logo but up until the introduction of the V2 upgrade was one of three headers seen.

The Post and Go (PAG) labels from May/June 2009 and all three kiosks are shown below. They are of the "Horizon" style.

As noted above, three different headers appeared - the PO oval, Wincor-Nixdorf and no logo. All three forms are illustrated below.

Change over of the PAG to the "Smartstamp" format at Spring Gardens was around 30th June 2009.

Kiosk 1 produced a rather dramatic error where a larger than normal font lead to a wrap around of the data string. Examples of this fault are shown here. This fault was subsequently note at two offices in the Portsmouth area.

It should be noted that during this initial period there were issues on the functionality of the kiosks. It was common for at least one kiosk to be out of service in the first couple of months.

The unfortunate thing was that I moved from Manchester circa August 2009 and shortly afterwards two kiosks were installed at Brazennose Street and another at Hyde. I have since managed to complete the set of kiosks in the Manchester/Stockport area bar one at Brazennose Street.