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ERMA Magnetic Ink Check

ERMA Magnetic Ink Check

Image creditSRI International, CC BY-SA 3.0
CC BY-SA 3.0 ↗

ERMA Magnetic Ink Check

Year
1955
Creator
Thomas Morrin, Jerre Noe, Kenneth Eldredge and the SRI ERMA team
Company
Stanford Research Institute, under contract to Bank of America
Location
Menlo Park, California

Description

This check has characters in magnetic ink that a machine can read, the input format for ERMA. SRI designed this bookkeeping computer for Bank of America and showed a prototype to the public in September 1955.

Importance

ERMA was one of the first computers for a daily business task and not for science or the military. General Electric made the production machines, and Bank of America started to use the first one in 1959. Banks in the United States and many other countries still print the magnetic ink characters from this project on checks.

Interesting fact

The magnetic ink reader received U.S. Patent No. 3,000,000 in 1961, a round number that SRI says the patent office kept for it.

Sources

  1. Banking automation: ERMA ↗SRI International
  2. 75 Years of Innovation: Banking Automation ERMA ↗SRI International
  3. US Patent 3,000,000, Automatic Reading System (K. R. Eldredge, assigned to General Electric) ↗Google Patents · 1961-09-12