Optical Character Recognition
Royal Mail installed 46 Optical Character Recognition (OCR) machines between 1987 and 1991; each OCR reader could deal with up to 30,000 items of mail per hour. They automatically read and analysed the typed or printed addresses on letters and printed the translation of the Postcode as a series of phosphor dots. Much simpler machines can then read these dots at later stages in the letter’s progress.
