🚀 go-pugleaf

hal@world.std.com (Harry A Levinson) writes:
>In article <1991May2.191802.2778@beaver.cs.washington.edu> dylan@june.cs.washington.edu (Dylan McNamee) writes:
>>
>>I am just now getting ready to order my next batch of checks for some
>>silly amount of money, and realized that I can make them myself in 
>>PostScript!  All I need is to get the account/check number in that
>>goofy computer readable font they use at the bottom of checks.  Is
>>this, or something like it around?  Anyone see any caveats?  

>I am suprised that banks still use the magnetic ink.  Our payroll service
>seems to print our checks with a laser printer.  You might call a 

If I remember the presentation I saw a year or so ago by Unisys, their new
check processing system does read the magnetic characters.  What they were
talking about was a new optical system that is put inline of the rest of the
check scaning and processing system.  The system would take a stack of checks
(constantly being filled by humans) and to a magnetic scan of the MICR strip,
then do a optical scan of both the front and back of the check.  The info
from the magnetic scan would go to a mainframe, the image data was processed
and queued onto servers.  The checks then went back into stacks.  The images
were sent to workstations via Ethernet and the magnetic data was also sent
to the workstation from the Mainframe, where an operator would key in the
data.  (The workstations 386 systems running OS/2 and PM with custom graphics
boards [for highspeed graphics data I/O].)  The check stacks were then run
thru another machine and the final MICR data was printed on them.  This
increased the thruput of a check and reduced the handling of the checks.
Anyone from Unisys know any more on how the systems are doing?  I know there
is a lot of Intel hardware and software in that system (Multibus I & II
processor cards and network cards, ISA bus systems and network cards, RMX II
real time OS, etc....

Sorry for the deviation from the subject, but yes the magnetic ink is still
used and needed (lots of small banks who can't afford to by the wiz-bang-neato
optical only systems.  Can you say Mega $$$ ?)

Tim Forsyth

-- 
Tim Forsyth, Intel Corp., Desktop Computer Division, Hillsboro, Oregon, USA
Internet: tim@int13.intel.com or Tim_Forsyth@ccm.hf.intel.com
CompuServe: 74040,2712 (checked once a week)