Why your checks use that weird font.
Channel: Eric Thornton
Date: 2021-04-19

↓↓↓↓ Sources and attributions ↓↓↓↓

General info about ERMA and MICR:

Ed Thelen's excellent website about ERMA, including some first hand interviews with the people who worked on it! : http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/ERMA.html

1995 SRI newsletter about ERMA: http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/SRI_Newsletter_Oct55-1.pdf

IEEE article on ERMA and MICR: http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/Dev-of-ERMA--LessonsFromHistory.pdf

Paywalled article about BofA's involvement in ERMA: www.jstor.org/stable/249500

A... different angle on the history of ERMA: https://spielberg-ocr.com/MICR.html


Attributions:

Punch_Cards - ArnoldReinhold, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

MICR_Font - SRI International, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Cassette - Tomasz Sienicki, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Floppy_Disk - George Chernilevsky, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

HDD - Evan-Amos, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Flash_Drive - By Evan-Amos - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11294374

Server - Victorgrigas, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Music: 
Background Music - anonymous420, CC BY 4.0 https://loyaltyfreakmusic.com/, via FreeMusicArchive

End Song - "A Mind is Born" by Linus Akesson BY-NC-SA 4.0, https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/

This video Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

-Eric Thornton, 2021
thorntoneric115@gmail.com