A closer look
Optical Character Recognition technology was heavily accelerated in the 1960s because the United States Postal Service was desperately trying to stop humans from manually reading every single ZIP code on millions of envelopes. They deployed massive, room-sized scanning machines that utilized early AI pattern recognition to decipher the terrible, illegible chicken-scratch handwriting of the American public. This means that the foundational technology behind modern PDF text extraction, license plate readers, and automated translation apps was born out of sheer bureaucratic desperation to process mail faster. Once again, monumental leaps in computer science were not driven by a noble quest for knowledge, but rather by the government realizing that paying actual humans to squint at poorly written numbers all day was a massive drain on the federal budget
