In the early days of computer optical character recognition, there was a need for a font that could be recognized by the computers of that day, and by humans. The resulting compromise was the OCR-A font, which used simple, thick strokes to form recognizable characters. The font is monospaced (fixed-width), with the printer required to place glyphs 0.254 cm apart, and the reader required to accept any spacing between 0.2286 cm and 0.4572 cm. Designed by The British Standards Institute in 1968.