Input devices

There is nowadays a wide choice of equipment for getting Information into a computer.

The most popular are punched card or paper tape readers capable of reading information at rates of over 1000 characters per second. Magnetic ink character recognition is used for banking and financial applications, and optical character recognition is now a practical reality. A tremendous amount of research is being applied to the machine reading of handwriting and to voice recognition.

There are many devices available for translatnig analogue data meter readings directly into acceptable digital form.

In all cases, the "reader simply converts Information to a standard form and loads the data into the core storage of the processor.