World's First Mail Processing Equipment

Adoption of machinery to improve the efficiency of postal operations was under consideration in 1965.

In 1966, the first trial device was completed for reading non-cursive handwritten numerals.
Next, the project was entrusted with research into reading freely written numerals, which involved a wide range of handwritten characters collected from around the country.
This analysis resulted in a report that reading such numbers was feasible.
In 1967, the General Research Laboratory's optical character recognition (OCR) technology was used to complete, at long last, the world's first device for reading handwritten characters, the TR-2.
In parallel to practical realization of the mail reading and recognition device (TR), the company completed the world's first automatic mail handling and printing device (TC) through detection of stamps in 1967.
In 1968, the company also completed the mail reading and recognition device capable of recognizing letterpress numbers.