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In
1963 some Martins’ machine room staff go from listing items on mechanical
adding machines and statement printers, to using the latest encoding machines
to print, in magnetic ink, a monetary value along the bottom of each cheque. Together
with other information already printed on the cheque, such as
a serial number, the sorting code number that identifies a particular branch
of Martins, and most importantly an account number, the cheque is thus
equipped to be read and sorted by machine, enabling funds to be quickly
removed from a customer’s balance . The
allocation of account numbers is met with some resistance by customers who
feel that banking will become impersonal – up to this point not even the
customer’s name has been printed on a cheque, and staff have to rely solely
on recognising and comparing a customer’s signature with branch records! A sophisticated system of account numbers
involving a complex mathematical check of the account number against the
sorting code, has been developed for all banks, and this effectively prevents
the customer from being debited for a transaction that isn’t theirs. |
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A cheque is placed in the encoding compartment of a
National Cash Register Company (NCR) encoding machine. |
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The principles of electronic reading, showing how characters printed
in magnetic ink are sensed and interpreted. Seventy “blocks” are scanned by
powerful logic circuits to interpret each of the fourteen permitted
characters in the E 13 B typeface. |
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Reading
and Sorting |
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The presence or
absence of magnetic ink in each of these sensing areas is recorded in an
electronic register, which therefore builds up an image of the printed
character. Powerful logic
circuits compare this image with the perfect character, and with the
thousands of permitted variations.
Some variation is inevitable, and the machine’s usefulness would be
very limited if only perfect reproductions were accepted. It therefore rejects only those images in
the electronic register which could be related to more than one of the 14
possible characters. The characters
which make up the E13B typeface have been carefully designed after exhaustive
analyses of comparative shapes. Each
is as different as possible from all the others, yet retains its legibility
for the human reader.
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©
gut informiert 2007 to date |
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