This Day in History

January 29, 1957

SRI and GE Meet to Choose a Place for ERMA's MICR Encoding

ERMA (Electronic Recording Machine - Accounting), developed by SRI and General Electric for the Bank of America in California, employed Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) as a tool that captures data from checks. IBM was making a strong case to place the encoding at the top of a check. SRI and GE conducted a series of tests that clearly demonstrated the advantage of the bottom-of-the-check encoding.