Ingenious New Machine "Reads” Printed Pages

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30393, 18 March 1964, Page 16

Ingenious New Machine "Reads” Printed Pages

Development of a machine that can “read” printed or typed pages and convert it into tapes or punched cards for use in computers has been announced in Philadelphia. The new machine is called a general purpose print reader system. A spokesman for the company which developed it said present methods of manually converting data to cards or tape and feeding the information into computers cannot keep up with the speed and capability of existing computers. The general purpose print reader system will help solve that problem, he claims He said the system “transports the documents, reads them, converts the printed words to machine language and writes the information on to magnetic tapes, paper tapes or punched cards.” The print reader uses a cathode ray tube to scan typed or printed pages. The system not only reads documents, but corrects mistakes and properly inserts the correction in the text. The company claims that the machine can be used with all known digital data pro-

cessing machines, can read and recognise different types of printing, can be instructed to read selected areas and ignore others and can scan 2000 characters per second. Pages are automatically fed into it for “reading.”—Reuter