Thankfully, those days are over, and while not all OCR scanning services offer the latest technology, more and more are incorporating startling advances made available over the last few years.
Though the technology was first invented in the early twentieth century by Gustav Tauschek, current OCR technology owes much of its success to Jacob Rabinow, whose work made OCR technology reliable enough for use by the U.S. Postal Service in the mid-sixties. Since that time, few major strides have changed the perception of OCR's ultimate capability until the development of intelligent character recognition. Intelligent character recognition was designed to allow for hand written character recognition and is currently employed in mass market palm pilots. The technology behind it has also been used to update traditional OCR, making it more reliable than ever.
During the transference of information from hard copy documents to electronic files, modern commercial OCR scanning technology can handle large volume text in an extremely short amount of time. Compared to the standards of one to three minutes per single, full page that were considered state of the art only a short time ago, OCR has made mass transference a viable method for reducing years of paperwork into just a few gigabytes of electronic storage. More importantly, it has made business information more easily accessible for those who need to search.
Physical filing relies on human cognition, which makes lost or misplaced documents a probability where mass filings are concerned. With electronic storage available through OCR, the same data can be reordered and organized within a database. Once information is entered, it will remain in the system where it can be located through simple search parameters.
Indeed, OCR technology has become an asset to businesses from a variety of industries, and with increased reliability in the transference process, is a technology that will be useful for many years to come.