The development of the ERMA banking system: lessons from history
Arthur Fisher, James L. McKenney · IEEE Annals of the History of Computing · 1993
In the early 1960s banking was faced with a paper-handling crisis. Banks were unable to keep on top of the rising number of checks and were unable to retain bookkeeping staff. The development of an automated bookkeeping and proofing system by Bank of America and Stanford Research Institute is described. SRI and BofA worked together to create ERMA (electronic recording machine-accounting) and to develop the MICR (magnetic-ink character recognition) check coding system. It is argued that the work on the project demonstrates the necessity of senior executive involvement, strong leadership, and innovative engineering.>