About Our Founder

IBML was founded in 1992 in Birmingham, Alabama, by Gary and Virginia Murphy. Mr. Murphy has spent his entire professional career in the scanning business and has utilized his extensive product knowledge and expertise to create a premier high-speed, high-volume color scanner that is more than simply a product solution, but is a complete process and workflow solution.

While working for Input Business Machines, a Rockville, Maryland, start-up, Mr. Murphy received a patent for the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Logics he developed in 1971. In 1972, Mr. Murphy sold his OCR technology to Burroughs Corp. for utilization in the 9134 sorter (which read at 3,000 characters per second), the Cummins Allison 216 transport, Control Data's reader sorter for Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) backup reading, Bell & Howell zip code readers, national pre-sort zip code readers, Computer Link's remittance processor, and various other applications.

Mr. Murphy also developed a Remote Intelligent Terminal (RIT 200/300), which he later sold to Amer-O-Matic with the Terminal Remittance Processor (TRP 500) and the State Department's passport quality control reading mechanisms. Mr. Murphy subsequently sold his RIT 5000 National Retailers Merchants Association (NRMA) tag reader to Dennison and Kimball in 1981. Mr. Murphy earned his next patent for the stacker method associated with the RIT 2000 in December 1980. Input Business Machines went public in 1983 and sold to BancTec, Inc. a year later.

During his one-and-a-half year tenure with BancTec, Mr. Murphy developed the 4200 remittance processor, which later evolved into the 4300 model. Mr. Murphy was granted a third patent for his front/back track view option, which enabled operator-increased keying speed. In 1985, Mr. Murphy left Banctec to found Hybrid Systems.

Hybrid Systems developed the 4512 reader sorter, which was originally sold in Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Italy and Germany. After developing the 5512 system, which processed 500 items per minute, Mr. Murphy sold the company to Recognition Equipment in 1991. In October of the same year, Mr. Murphy's patent for his stacker belt design was approved.

The next year, Mr. Murphy founded IBML in order to develop the 2048C (a 2,048 pixel Kodak color array) which was one of the first high-speed, full 24-bit color transports to bridge the gap between page scanners and item transports. The original 2048C later evolved into the ImageTrac.