In November of 1992, the CASIC Committee on Technology Testing recommended to the CASIC management that SRD build a small prototype system that used intelligent character recognition to recognize hand-printed data on faxed questionnaire images. In January of 1994, a PC based proof of concept (POC) system had been put in place and testing began on a small scale, starting with a group of fifty participants of the Survey of Manufacturer's Shipments and Inventories (M3). Fifty respondents would fax their completed questionnaire to an 800 number, and the system would automatically extract the data from the fax image. After six months of testing, we increased the size of the test group to 100 respondents.