Donald E. Troxel

TEWKSBURY, MA—William Schreiber, ECRM founder and professor emeritus at MIT, died Sept. 21 at his home at the age of 84. Together with Melvin Fennell from The Associated Press and fellow MIT professors Samuel Mason and Donald Troxel, Mr. Schreiber developed one of the first commercially successful optical character recognition (OCR) machines in 1969. In March of 1969, he founded Electronic Character Recognition Machinery (ECRM). Though the funeral was private, a commemoration of Dr. Schreiber’s life will be held at the MIT Faculty Club at 5 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 21.