Shepard was born September 30, 1923, in
Milwaukee. His father died when he was 2 and his mother when he was 10. His guardian was
Laurens Hammond who invented the
Hammond organ. He worked during
World War II for the Armed Forces Security Agency (now
National Security Agency) on
cryptanalysis, breaking Japanese codes. His nickname was "D-Shep" and "Party Shep" After the war he built an
optical character recognition device (reading machine) in his attic with Harvey Cook Jr. called "Gismo". In 1952 he formed
Intelligent Machines Research Corporation to commercialize the invention with William Lawless Jr. in
Arlington, Virginia.
IBM licensed the machine, but never put it into production. Shepard designed the Farrington B numeric font now used on most
credit cards. Recognition was more reliable on a simple and open font, to avoid the effects of smearing at gasoline station pumps. Reading credit cards was the first major industry use of OCR, although today the information is read magnetically from the back of the cards. In 1962 Shepard founded Cognitronics Corporation. In 1964 his patented "Conversation Machine" was the first to provide telephone
Interactive voice response access to computer stored data using
speech recognition. The first words recognized were "yes" and "no". Since the 1980s he worked on
high altitude wind power, harnessing winds at high altitudes to generate power. He founded Sky WindPower Corporation with Australian Bryan William Roberts of the
University of Sydney. Shepard died in
San Diego of
bronchiectasis on November 24, 2007, at the age of 84. ==Patents==