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To celebrate TAWPI's 30the anniversary, we will examine many of the changes that have occurred since 1970. While OCR can be traced back to 1809, most of the significant innovations have happened in the past 30 years.
OCR and forms processing began in 1809 when the first patents for inventions that aided the blind were awarded. Eighty years later, Nipkow of Poland invented sequential scanning (raster scanning) which analyzed an image line by line, similar to today's OCR and image scanners.
The first documented reference to a true optical reader (i.e., a machine that converts printed characters into code) was in 1912 when Mr. Goldberg patented a machine that read printed characters and converted them into telegraph code. Goldberg's machine enabled telegraph messages to be read, encoded and transmitted without human intervention by converting the typed message into paper tape. This paper then generated the proper Morse code. In 1914, Fournier d'Albe invented the first operational OCR reading machine as an aid to the blind. This "Optophone" was a hand-held scanner, which emitted a "meaningful audio output" when it moved across a printed page.
In 1946, at Sarnoff Laboratories, RCA developed the "Electric Pencil" which performed many of the same functions as d' Albe's machine, but it was considerably more compact. As early as 1948, Mort Taube at the RCA Sarnoff Laboratories suggested that signals from the "Electric Pencil" could be coupled with a facsimile device to transmit a digitized printed page (image) to remote terminals. This is the earliest record of digital imaging.
David Shepard, who founded the Intelligent Machine Corporation (IMC), patented the first practical OCR reader for data entry in 1954. This was installed at Reader's Digest where it converted typewritten documents into punch cards in the magazine's subscription department. In 1962, Jacob Rabinow of Rabinow Engineering Company demonstrated the capability to optically recognize handprinted characters. Later that year Rabinow installed its first OCR system at Ryder Trucking. It optically read two lines of typed numeric data on waybills simultaneously.
In November 1961 Recognition Equipment was founded to design and build OCR systems that could read a variety of fonts and typestyles from real world papers.
From 1961 to 1964, Recognition researched and developed its classic reader, the "Electronic Retina...