<P> Prior to the introduction of computers, cheque processing was performed manually by each institution . The advent of computers necessitated the development of peripheral equipment that would aid in the processing of cheques and other MICR encoded documents . Machines were developed that could be used to read the MICR information encoded at the bottom of the cheques and other financial instruments, so that they could be sorted and the information passed to the processing system for computer posting . Some of these machines operated in an offline capacity to further sort cheques and other documents as required without online processing . Many firms were developing and designing hardware and software for use by financial institutions to perform their day - to - day operations, among those IBM . </P> <P> IBM introduced the 3890 High Speed Document Processor in 1973 . This piece of equipment is used by financial institutions to sort and tally all cheques, utility payment and gift certificates at the end of each banking day . The machine reads the magnetic ink characters (MICR) and / or the optical characters (OCR) that are encoded on the bottom of each document . This code line facilitates totalling the cheques and sorting them into pockets . The document process is designed to feed at a rate of 2400 six inch cheques per minute . </P> <P> An application called Check Processing Control System (CPCS) is run on a main frame . It receives the data from the document processor and can store information from the cheques, including the bank number, branch number, account number and the amount the check was written for, as well as internal transaction codes . The 3890 can also operate in an offline mode using an SCI (Stacker Control Instruction) program . </P> <P> The machine is made up of several modules, each performing specific task . At the far left of the machine is the control unit . Sort control programs, character recognition and host connection are handled by an IBM PC server in the control unit (3890 / XP). Early A-F models used an IBM S / 360 based processor with magnetic core memory . It links to all the electronic control systems and cabling that is required to operate the machine . </P>

Ibm designed machine using what to store information in banking