E-13B is the 50-year-old typeface standard for numerical optical character recognition. You can see examples of this typeface on the bottom of nearly any check in the world. The counterpart to E-13B, CMC-7, can be found on French, Spanish, and Mediterranean banknotes. E-13B was developed in the mid 1950's by Stanford University for Bank of America, and approved by the American Banking Association in 1958. In 1963 it was accepted as the ANSI standard. After WWII the American banking industry saw an explosion in the use of personal checks as people began buying goods from distant distributors. This made automated check sorting necessary, and thus a system for machines to read printed characters was needed. E-13B was the first system to take advantage of MIRC (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition) technology. Though the characters were designed to be machine readable via OCR, the characters are printed with magnetic ink for reading by MIRC scanners. MIRC scanners read magnetic spikes, differentiated by amptitude and the position of peaks, rather than optically interpreting the printed character. Most modern check scanners use both techniques. Optical recognition of E-13B was crucial to the Stanford designers, and the typeface features exaggerated serif blocks to easily and clearly distinguish characters. The MIRC and OCR components of this typeface were so well designed that E-13B has remained in successful use for some 50 years. Perhaps the greatest limitation to E-13B is the very limited character set. It supports only 0 through 9, plus four additional banking symbols. It was this limitation which made the OCR-A and OCR-B typefaces necessary in the late 1960's. Those typefaces offered full alphanumeric character sets which were more human-readable, but which have not seen the longevity or near-universal application of E-13B.