Retrotechtacular: IBM’s The World of OCR
<img width="800" height="487" src="![image](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/ibm_promo_video_optical_character_recognition_1960s_periscopefilm_youtube.jpg?w=800")
alt=""/>Optical Character Recognition (OCR) forms the bridge between the analog world of paper and the world of machines. The modern-day expectation is that when we point a smartphone camera at 
alt=""/>Optical Character Recognition (OCR) forms the bridge between the analog world of paper and the world of machines. The modern-day expectation is that when we point a smartphone camera at Hackaday
Retrotechtacular: IBM’s The World Of OCR
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) forms the bridge between the analog world of paper and the world of machines. The modern-day expectation is tha...
Hackaday
Retrotechtacular: IBM’s The World Of OCR
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) forms the bridge between the analog world of paper and the world of machines. The modern-day expectation is tha...
![image](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/microphone.jpg?w=800")
alt=""/>This week the Hackaday Podcast is on vacation, but we’d like to wish you all happy holidays and a great 2026. Thanks for tuning in! We’ll be back next week. 
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alt=""/>There are all kinds of fun, glowing PC cases on the market these days. However, if you want something that focuses on serviceability over flash while still looking stylish, you 
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alt=""/>It’s no surprise that NVIDIA is gradually dropping support for older videocards, with the Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs most recently getting axed. What’s more surprising is the terrible way that 
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alt=""/>Holiday cookies are a joy, and to make things a bit more fun, [The Skjegg] created the Cookie Launcher. At the touch of a button, a door opens and the 
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alt=""/>Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of mathematics is that it applies to literally everything, even things that do not exist in this Universe. In addition to this there are a 
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alt=""/>Facebook Marketplace provides you with a free grain silo, so what do you do with it? If you are [saveifforparts], you mix it with other materials and produce a retro-style 
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alt=""/>Although you can purchase many types of FDM filaments containing ‘carbon fiber’ these days, they are in no way related to the carbon fiber (CF) composite materials used for rocket 
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alt=""/>Pagers were once a great way to get a message to someone out in public; they just had to be cool enough to have one. These days, they’re mostly the 
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alt=""/>Would you feel confident in buying US-made LiFePO4 (LFP) batteries? While the answer here is generally expected to be ‘yes’, especially compared to getting an unbranded LFP battery off eBay 
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alt=""/>In a curious historical twist, the “Twelve days of Christmas” are actually the days of revelry that followed the 25th. The preceding period, Advent, was traditionally a fast, not unlike 
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alt=""/>These days, sim racing is more realistic than ever. There are better screens, better headsets, and better steering wheels with better force-feedback, all of which help make you feel like 
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alt=""/>Printing metal as easily as it is to printed with thermoplastics has been a dream for a very long time, with options for hobbyists being very scarce. This is something 
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alt=""/>We seldom talk about 3D printing lenses because most techniques can’t possibly produce transparent parts of optical quality. However, you can 3D print something like a lens, as [Luke Edwin] demonstrates, 
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alt=""/>Key to efficient hardware emulation is an efficient mapping to the underlying CPU’s opcodes. Here one is free to target opcodes that may or may not have been imagined for 
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alt=""/>Disposable cameras are a fun way to get into classical photography. However, they can also be a valuable source of interesting parts that can be put to other uses. For 
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alt=""/>There are plenty of lovely e-readers out on the market that come with an nice big e-paper display. There aren’t nearly as many that come with two. [Martin den Hoed] developed the 
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alt=""/>If you read about Hall effect sensors — the usual way to detect and measure magnetic fields these days — it sounds deceptively simple. There’s a metal plate with current 
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alt=""/>Currently quartz crystal-based oscillators are among the most common type of clock source in electronics, providing a reasonably accurate source in a cheap and small package. Unfortunately for high accuracy 