It has become difficult to keep hundreds of paper copies of fingerprints and keep track of the many different areas of the world. If a crime occurs in an area and the person flees, it may be difficult for the police to locate the suspect based solely on fingerprints. It was not until the early 1960s that the FBI and many other large police forces around the world began to begin production of the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, also known as AFIS (Moses 124-125). They needed a fast, easy-to-use system that could hold thousands of fingerprint pieces of information that could be easily shared across the United States. An FBI special agent, Carl Voelker, went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to design the AFIS they were hoping for. After studying how the FBI currently manually searches for fingerprints, the NIST team decided the simplest way would be to transfer the information into an electronic database. They then created a scanner that could capture fingerprints on a card or on a card taken from the crime scene. The image would then be compared to fingerprints stored in the online database. While looking for a fingerprint match, it also records the minutiae and pattern of the fingerprint. The first prototype was created in 1972 by Cornell Aeronautical Labs Inc., and was successful. From 1986,