Optical Archives was founded in 1988 by Eugene Singer. While working on one of the largest antitrust cases with 185 paralegals, he realized that keeping track of millions of documents required an imaging system. Each piece of paper could be scanned and the digitized image would be linked to the database being created by the paralegals. The system was soon used by one of the major telephone carriers to store millions of pension documents.

The transition to data from paper documents came when the telephone carrier sought to store the mainframe phone bills to optical disc and more recently to DVD. Many hospitals began using Optical Archives to scan their medical records, accounts payable and human resource documents. The hospitals also began sending their data from their mainframes with laboratory data and blood bank data. Today Optical Archives scans millions of paper documents and has a team of programmers managing one of the largest databases in the telecommunications field.