The development of the ERMA banking system: lessons from history

Author

Fisher, Amy Weaver ; Mckenney, James L.

Author_Institution

Harvard Law Sch., Boston, MA, USA

Volume

15

Issue

1

fYear

1993

fDate

6/15/1905 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

44

Lastpage

57

Abstract

In the early 1960s banking was faced with a paper-handling crisis. Banks were unable to keep on top of the rising number of checks and were unable to retain bookkeeping staff. The development of an automated bookkeeping and proofing system by Bank of America and Stanford Research Institute is described. SRI and BofA worked together to create ERMA (electronic recording machine-accounting) and to develop the MICR (magnetic-ink character recognition) check coding system. It is argued that the work on the project demonstrates the necessity of senior executive involvement, strong leadership, and innovative engineering.<>

Keywords

bank data processing; optical character recognition; ERMA; automated bookkeeping; banking system; check coding system; cheque coding system; electronic recording machine-accounting; magnetic-ink character recognition; Banking; Character recognition; History; Ink; Magnetic recording; Marine vehicles; Packaging machines; Pulp and paper industry; Shipbuilding industry; Sorting;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Annals of the History of Computing, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1058-6180

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/85.194091

Filename

194091