Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!decvax!harpo!seismo!hao!hplabs!sri-unix!ron@BRL.ARPA
From: ron@BRL.ARPA@sri-unix.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: OCR and Checks
Message-ID: <1873@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 7-Jun-83 20:23:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.1873
Posted: Tue Jun  7 20:23:00 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 11-Jun-83 18:27:28 EDT
Lines: 24

From:  Ron Natalie 

One of the electrical surplus mail order places (like H&R or someone)
had OCR wands for some low (<$100) price.  They claimed that these
were the same as the Sears ones and the picture provided was a dead
ringer for it.  I would probably guess that the electronics that came
with it not as extensive (or not at all) as the $2000 package from the
first company.  A reasonable toy for people who have the initiative
to build their own interface.

OCR would be a very nice thing to have on a personal computer because
it is so much easier produced than bar codes (all though the hardware
to read it is more complex).  In addition OCR can be read by humans
easily, unlike bar codes.  You can get OCR balls for your selectric
and for most of the wheel printers.  Bar codes require somekind of
medium resoulution plotting (I've seen it done on Printronix dot
matrix printers) that may be a little too rich for the average home
printer.

-Ron

P.S.  I used to have a friend who always printed his correspondance
with an OCR diablo wheel because he wanted people to be aware that
it came from a computer.