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Encoded software scanner

whartung

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Apr 23, 2020
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737
Back in I'm going to say about 1985, a company released a bar shaped scanner specifically for loading software from the printed page.

A program would encode a file as a series of encoded bars, roughly 10" x 1", with encoded blocks that look much like a QR Code today.

You would place the device on the bar, and it had a moveable scanner head that would scan the page.

You would do this several times as the files would span several encoded bars. You could easily fit 4 of these bars per 8.5x11 page.

The device was brown, about a foot long, about 2" wide. Motorized, as it moved the scan head vs you dragging it down yourself.

Dr. Dobbs Journal actually used it for several issues, printing the encoded bars next to their program listings.

Alas, in the "Best Of" Dr Dobbs collections that they produced each year, they seem to have removed those encodings, and it seems all reference to it. It seems they also removed all of their advertising, and so this was likely done at the same time.

Just curious if anyone recalled the device, recalled the name. It worked on Macs and PCs (indeed, I got one as a prize at a Mac show).
 
There was the Cauzin Softstrip https://rich12345.tripod.com/museum2/softstrip.html Local company which continued making barcode software for another 20+ years though the computer storage portion ended.

There was a competitor which released a "magazine" filled with barcodes to sell their bar code reader. I am blanking on the name of the other product. Correction: It was Databar as seen at https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject:"Databar+Corporation"

And about a decade later, came the CueCat to read short URL barcodes embedded in advertising.
 
There was the Cauzin Softstrip https://rich12345.tripod.com/museum2/softstrip.html Local company which continued making barcode software for another 20+ years though the computer storage portion ended.
Yes, that was it. I remember the name now. Thank you.

I had not seen the second one, but, like everyone else when they shipped a reader to the entire planet, I, too, have seen and had a CueCat.
 
It wasn't too unreasonable for software distribution on barcode to be expected to take off. The PPC Journal included barcode listing of many programs for the HP-41C over the span of about 5 years. HP had barcode listings for their HP-41 software in the manual; mag cards were extra. HP even supplied a program to print out those bar codes though I doubt HP's thermal paper would last long. The major difference was that the HP-41C's optical wand was a lot cheaper and a general purpose device. It probably helped that HP-41 programs were much shorter than what anyone would accept for a computer.
 
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