Data in a form that can be read by the computer, which includes hard drives, solid state drives, optical discs, magnetic tapes and, decades ago, punch cards. Printed fonts and barcodes that can be scanned and recognized by a computing device are also machine readable. Although ordinary images may be recognizable by a computer using today's machine vision technologies, they are not considered machine readable unless they were altered in some manner explicitly for the computer. See
computer vision.