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German parliament will stop using fax machines
(www.npr.org)
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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Technology
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I was about to say, you could do serviceable OCR on a 486, which illustrates just how little processing power is needed for conventional approaches compared to this hallucinating AI nonsense.
OCR existed long before the 486. AFAIK it was already used in the 70's or 80's to scan mail and presort them based on the postcode. I remember that postcards had light orange boxes (presumably because this color was invisible to B/W scanners?) with dots inside where you where supposed to write the postcode numbers in.
Doing OCR in a very specific format, in a small specific area, using a set of only 9 characters, and having a list of all possible results, is not really the same problem at all.
🤔
I meant OCR of arbitrary printed or faxed text, which really only became feasible for home users in the 1990s. There were professional, but often very limited, solutions earlier than that, of course.