selektor 1976-10

A few years ago Mullard Research Laboratories (MRL) started a pro- ject to develop a new `optical charac- ter recognition` unit. OCR equipment at the time was bulky and expensive and, to be commercially successful, had to process a very high volume of documents. A computer data collection system would use a central OCR installation for entering source documents. The new reader units would have to be small enough and cheap enough to be installed wherever documents are presented; for example airline ticket offices, bank branches. In these and similar applications there is a steady trickle of documents, each containing perhaps only a single line of numerals which need to be entered into the data system. The performance required of an OCR reader for this task is relatively low and it was reasonable to expect that the manu- facturing cost could be reduced accord- ingly.