Dustbury posted this Hurst advertisement from 1964. Naturally, I tried to read it. I could make out some of it, and then I got the bright idea of trying OCR (Optical Character Recognition). I found a couple of sites on-line and
tried one of them. It didn't do too well. Hmm. Let's see how well I can do.
I used
a text to image convertor to format this. I guess I'm just a converting kind of guy today. Not too bad, though there a couple of words I am not too sure of. Starfire, for instance, in the last paragraph.
Oldsmobile did make a Starfire, but according to Wikipedia, they didn't start making it until 1975, which contradicts Dustbury's date for this ad. Normally I would expect to see Cutlass, or 442 in that place, but I couldn't get my eyes to agree with either of those. So I don't know what model name is really there.
I may have gotten some of the sexist remarks wrong as well, but it's been a long time, and I'm not sure my grasp of lingo from the 60's is as sharp as it once was.
Update February 2017 replaced missing images.
There was an Olds Starfire from '61 through '66; Wikipedia even has a picture of a '61.
ReplyDeleteThere are many other online OCR services existing one the web as well like: good ocr
ReplyDeleteI tried "good ocr" on a a piece of text from the ad (the left hand top paragraph starting with "For Him"). All I got back was
ReplyDeleteiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
iiiifiiiiiIlII
OCR may be good for large volumes of clearly printed text, but it's got a ways to go before it can match a human.
Looking at the image again, I find it almost impossible to figure out what the words are.