I found an old US passport issued in 1984 that is machine readable, so we've had them for awhile now.

I'm actually very surprised that the new US policy to exclude non-OCR passports from the Visa Waiver Program is needed in order to get other countries to adopt this common-sense standard. Really now, putting the passport information in OCR characters is not rocket science and has obvious benefits - why has it taken so long for some contries to do so? It's not like "machine readable" means using a smart chip or some other sort of fancy technology.