The first part of this article last month looked at the main points of the service as it was introduced in 1961 – an essentially manual operation. It carried on in much the same way until 1993, when the Royal Mail special services (registration, special delivery and recorded delivery) were modernised to use barcodes for tracking, rather than serial numbers that had to be written down. The main changeover was on 28 June (Fig. 1), although the use of barcodes had been pioneered with recorded delivery for a couple of months prior to that, resulting in a short-lived type of label (Fig. 2).
This change was accompanied by a rebrand, with the distinctive and colourful labels used for the three services replaced by ones all in the same style, in a tastefully muted dark blue colour (Fig.
