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Technology Pioneers Receive High Honors at
SRI International for Banking Innovations
SRI's Gibson Achievement Award Event Recognizes Group that First Computerized
Banking in the 1950s for Bank of America
MENLO PARK, California - March 19, 2001 - SRI International,
a leading research institute based in Silicon Valley, today announced
that it will be honoring the SRI team that pioneered
computerized banking in the early 1950s - when there were few
computers in the world and none were used for accounting or finance.
In a five-year project with Bank of America, a team of SRI engineers
- including Jerre Noe, Byron Bennett, C. Bruce Clark, Bonnar "Bart"
Cox, Jack Goldberg, Fred Kamphoefner, Philip E. Merritt and Oliver
W. Whitby, and other important SRI and Bank of America contributors
- laid the cornerstone of modern electronic banking. Their pioneering
contributions have been described by Professor James L. McKenney
of the Harvard Business School, who wrote a history of this work,
as the "first successful use of computers in business operations
anywhere in the world."
Event to Honor Pioneering Team
The SRI project team will be honored with
SRI's Weldon B. Gibson Achievement Award during a ceremony and reception on March 21 at 4:00 p.m. at SRI International (333 Ravenswood Avenue, Menlo Park, California). The prestigious award is given to SRI staff members who have made a noteworthy impact on the improvement of the general standard of living and the peace and prosperity of society, and who have added special luster to the reputation of SRI International. Previous Gibson Award recipients are Doug Engelbart, the father of personal computing and the computer mouse, and H. Edwin Robison, who was recognized for his work with developing societies and nations worldwide. The Gibson Achievement Award was established in 1996 in honor of one of SRI's earliest executives, Senior Director Emeritus Dr. Weldon B. "Hoot" Gibson, on the occasion of SRI's 50th anniversary
SRI Innovations Result in Greater Banking Efficiencies, Accuracy
Before the Bank of America project with SRI, banks typically closed mid-afternoon to manually process and proof all of the day's transactions. Since the post-WWII era brought with it a dramatic increase in the number of new accounts at Bank of America - 23,000 per month by 1950 - the situation was worsening rapidly.Called the "whiz kids" by Bank of America, SRI's team first performed a feasibility study that determined the requirements of an electronic bookkeeping system. When none of the major electronic system houses of the day would take on building such a system, the Bank persuaded SRI to do so. In due course, the project resulted in the following innovations:
- Checks with pre-printed account numbers, a departure from the previous convention of arranging accounts alphabetically by name
- Magnetic ink and machine-readable typefaces that provided infallible reading of account numbers by computers
- A check reader and sorter that could process ten checks per second with an error probability of less than 0.00001 percent, eliminating the need for punched cards
- The Electronic Recording Machine, Accounting ("ERMA") prototype, which was the first machine to automatically update and post checking accounts and to enable multiple workers within a branch bank to determine account status and validate inputs electronically
Today, magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) can be found in the form of the block-style numbers on the bottom of checks, which is still used in check processing in banks worldwide."SRI International is celebrating its 55th anniversary this year. It is particularly fitting that the team responsible for one of SRI's greatest innovations has been selected to receive the Gibson Achievement Award in 2001," said Curt Carlson, president and CEO of SRI International. "By introducing electronics, real-time computing and robotics to banking, the ERMA team deserves not only the gratitude of SRI, but that of the finance world as well."
About SRI International
Menlo Park-based SRI International (www.sri.com) is one of the world's foremost independent research and technology development organizations. Founded in 1946 as Stanford Research Institute, SRI has been meeting the strategic needs of global markets for more than 50 years. As part of its strategy to bring its high-value innovations to the marketplace, SRI licenses its technologies, forms strategic partnerships, and creates spin-off companies.
For more information about the Gibson Award, visit SRI's web site
at http://www.sri.com/about/awards.html.
A timeline of SRI's historic innovations and contributions to society is available
at http://www.sri.com/about/timeline/.
SRI International is a registered trademark.
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