"half-dollar"/"50 cent piece" Was: Recovering the ROM of an IBM 5100 using OCR

[Alan Perry]

On 7/1/19 5:01 AM, William Donzelli via cctalk wrote:
>> In every other country I've visited or lived in -- about 30 or 40 of
>> them -- banknotes are all different sizes, so that totally blind
>> people can sort by size if they have a few of them. I daresay the very
>> skilled can do it by absolute, not relative, size. Sighted people can
>> and do do it by touch without really thinking about it.
> US currency is the most most seriously counterfeited in the world, due
> to being useful almost anywhere. This is why the bills are not very
> distinctive - you are supposed to look at them. Most counterfeits are
> good, but not good enough, and can (and will) stick out in a batch of
> bills - the might just look "funny" or "odd". Have millions of eyes
> looking for the counterfeits ever day of the year is actually quite
> effective. I once worked at a bank, and the number of bogus bills that
> the tellers would get every month was very significant - and most
> actually stuck out like a sore thumb!.
I sold a $3500 car once for cash to a guy who sold his goods at a booth 
at fairs and shows. He received lots and lots of $20 bills in payment, 
so that is what he paid me with. I kept the cash instead of depositing 
it in the bank and going to an ATM to get cash out.

One day I was counting out some cash and two of the bills felt funny. 
This was before a lot of the anti-counterfeiting features in current $20 
bills. The bills themselves looked really close to real ones, but the 
feel of the paper was wrong.
>
>
>
>>   Paper cheques disappeared in Britain a decade ago
>> and are very rare now.
> That is mostly the case here as well. Most under-40 people do not have
> a checkbook anymore. In my business, I get maybe two payments per year
> with checks - well under 1/10 of a percent of total payments.
>
>> My American friends and colleagues over here talk about US cheque
>> processing and sending _images_ of cheques to one another, and the
>> Czechs are incredulous. This is like hearing about carrying letters by
>> horse-drawn carriage in these parts; this is a technology that never
>> really happened here and that pretty much no living person has ever
>> seen.
> There are still a few institutions and older folks that still use
> checks (like the annoying people that hold up the line in a grocery
> store, writing out a check), so the image deposit system is just an
> effort to cut down the foot traffic to banks. More convenience for
> customers, and less labor costs for banks. It is handy to have, but
> really, not many people use it much, simply because getting a paper
> check is just a rare occurrence these days.

Maybe for you. I did a group purchase of tickets for a club I am a 
member of.  Almost everyone paid me for their tickets paid with checks. 
I help organize motorsports events; my expenses are reimbursed with checks.

alan
>
> --
> Will