Typing in lost code

Maybe. But OCR programs have had learning features for decades. I've spent quite a lot of time in FineReader learning mode. Material produced on a moderate-quality typewriter, like the CDC 6600 wire lists on Bitsavers, can be handled tolerably well. Especially with post-processing that knows what the text patterns should be and converts common misreadings to what they should be. But the listings I mentioned before were entirely unmanageable even after a lot of "learning mode" effort. An annoying wrinkle was that I wasn't dealing with greenbar but rather with Dutch line printer paper that has every other line marked with 5 thin horizontal lines, almost like music score paper. Faded printout with a worn ribbon on a substrate like that is a challenge even for human eyeballs, and all the "machine learning" hype can't conceal the fact that no machine can come anywhere close to a human for dealing with image recognition under tough conditions.