I worked for Cauzin. I wrote the Mac app that printed SoftStrips on the Apple ImageWriter dot matrix printer, and also participated in the programming of the Laser Archivist. I'm still in touch with a few of the people I worked with at Cauzin. Thanks for this video, it was an enjoyable walk down memory lane.
@@WackoPaco Was the system documented anywhere? I've idly considered using a flatbed scanner to read these things in. There were a few books that had some fairly long programs on them.
In the (semi)modern day, the Nintendo DSi had a programming environment available for purchase on its DSi Shop called Petit Computer. Programs could be exported into files that could be shared with other systems. However, due to Nintendo policy, files could not be imported directly. The workaround for this was a QR code scanner. On the Petit Computer was a website with a Flash applet that would convert a Petit Computer export into a series of QR codes in PNG images.
The GBA had an accessory called the e-Reader which could load in data from little dot based bar codes on cards that you swiped, I wonder if anyone has ever reverse engineered those?
@@BeaverDaBeaverThey have been reverse engineered down to being able to write GBA executable programs. The dot codeson eReader cards are actually less fine than the Soft Strip dot codes, with a little printer tuning, you can print your own with ease.
Fun fact: One of the most successful 3DS exploits relied on the level sharing functionality the game Cubic Ninja had, it produced QR codes for custom levels but the game didn't have enough checks to prevent arbitrary code execution, thus, Ninjhax was born.
Ahh I remember Petit Computer, the follow up on 3DS was released under the name Smile BASIC, and we also got the revision of it for Switch too. I had a ton of fun with projects from the community on both the DSi and 3DS versions but don't think I ever made anything all that good on it. I never got to try the Switch version as I never got a Switch.
@@JORGETECHJorgeI remember that! That was the first widely available exploit for the console. I still have my exploited cartridge on a shelf. The game itself... was so simple people were confused why it had a cartridge release, but it was convenient.
So thats what ESC/P stands for... Lol... I am an IT officer in food distribution office, installing and troubleshooting probably hundreds of Epson Dot matrik printer from LQ 2180,2190,LX 300,and LX 310 in my office for more than a decade and this is how I finally knew what it stands for...
I believe it’s evolved to become the ESC-POS standard for dedicated Point Of Sale printers, many are sold by Epson and Star. I had to write an emulator a few years back that could take ESC-POS commands and output a PDF document that could be emailed. Legal requirement required the emailed version had to look the same as the printed version.
If you think the "Stripper" name was suggestive, there was also a program (not by Cauzin) for serial port data transfer between two PCs (similar to LapLink) called "PC Hooker"... I guess because you hook together the two machines via a cable?
@@vwestlife eh, tastes. I much prefer tongue-in-cheek over the obsession about everything being formal and proper. Political correctness be damned, there has always been a need for software with a sense of humour, even if it was sometimes a bit puerile. This is even more true today, with corporations prioritising avoiding the wrath of karens at any cost over having any fun. Thanks for coming to my TED talk, and keep kicking the llama's ass.
Funny and true story. I used to work at computerland in the mid 80's. We had a real issue with IBM PC's and memory problems. Customers would run jobs overnight, just to come in in the morning to find the computer had crashed, and no data was available as to where the memory fault was. I created a device (quite a simple one) that took the NMI for parity error and latched in the high 4 bits of the address bus, so you would know which bank of memory was bad. I called it a PECKER, short for Parity chECKER. That was immediately vetoed by the management of my store (for obvious reasons). Nobody said computer geeks are not socially awkward, and prone to off color humor.
IME, subtlety goes a long way. It seems you can get away with something that can be interpreted as off-color if you shroud it in legitimacy. Because then there's always that shadow of a doubt... "Did they _know?_ They had to have known.... right?" Let the conservative folks live in the comfort of their innocence, and those who want to be in on the joke can assume whatever they'd like. To this day, I'm convinced that Bezos mastered the art of subtle trolling. The Amazon mark on the boxes? The rocket? You can't convince me this guy wasn't trying to sneak eggplant emojis everywhere he could. It just seems like the kind of thing he'd do.
I remember the premier TRS-80 magazine, had a service called "load 80" where you could buy all the programs in the issue on tape and have them delivered to your house. Of course, i could not afford this, and learned a whole LOT about troubleshooting not only basic, but assembler and machine code. Computing was hard mode, back in the day.
Softstrips can also be found in the pages of Nibble magazine for the Apple II. Oh and the Apple //c had two 6551 ACIA (Asynchronous Communication Interface Adapters) in it. Providing two completely independent serial ports.
Indeed, I remember an Apple magazine having them too. I have a vague memory of being in a study hall in high school and a friend showing me these long strips in a magazine. Wasn't a magazine called AppleIncider or something like that. But I do recall seeing them in a magazine other than Byte.
Thank you! I went through a few revision of my script on this one as I kept digging. When I first found out about Paperbytes it was nearly a complete rewrite hah. I still think I could have shown a few more examples of it scanning, but focusing more on the era around it felt like right call to keep it tight.
There is a version of printing code to paper as a bitmap and using a scanner to read it into the system. It's called Paperback . It was originally a Proof of Concept joke to explain something that's grown to have a nich crowd. While it has been used to encode an entire program it is mainly used to store passwords that can be hand delivered or even sent in the US Mail without anyone reading it. It's biggest drawback was that even with the best resolution printing and scanning a sheet of typing paper still stored less than 4 Gigs of information and with lower resolutions it was more often less than 300 MB. Still some argued that with a shelf life of more than 100 years backing up data on paper can make sense.
@@alexcrouseSorry about getting wordy most of what was written was how it work, why would anyone use it and how long would the data last in this format ( from about 100 years for regular copy paper to about 5000 years if one takes a laser cutter to etch a file on a polished slab of stone).
@@alexcrouse I posted a link in this subset but I don't see it. There is another copy of the link to the original version ( only about 3M per sheet of paper) in the main comments with my username.
Hey, I recommend shifting your books to the front of the shelves. It helps with air circulation and is better for the books to prevent mold. I worked at a library for a while and that's where I learned that tidbit. Good libraries will have their items on the front of the shelf, not pushed to the back.
I don't have a library (At my pay grade?!? ♿🇬🇧🏚) so I can't speak from experience, but I think this can be made much easier to achieve by simply having a piece of batten (Sawn wood) at the back of the shelf so when the books/mags are pushed home (As we all do) they stop at the batten, not at the back of the shelf. This makes airflow circulation easier to achieve _without_ having to push and pull books to achieve this, reducing further wear/tear on them. 💡😇
This needed to be released in 1975, not 1984 or 85. Outside of the magazines, there was no need for it. Even the magazines could easily have just put all their stuff on BBS. It didn't catch on because it just had no reasonable use case by the time it came out. There were software stores everywhere by 1985. Not only did they sell expensive software, they also usually carried lower end software and even free ware on diskette or tape. This was usually very low priced for a disk with 20 different programs on it of various quality.
He says theres no one reason it failed, theres just no reason it would succeed. Also comparing it to the failed 1541 is ridiculous - that thing basically killed the Commodore. Every other disc was 10x faster and less than half the price. A PC floppy drive was half the cost of this, if you had a controller.
@@mycosysThe 1541 definitely killed the Commodore. The C64 was basically stillborn, and definitely didn't come close to being the best-selling 8-bit computer of all time.
@@mycosys First, there is the fact that I did not compare it to the 1541, so there's that. But second, the 64 was the best selling computer of all time to this day. Commodore died because the home computer died in the 90s.
Typing was fun when you were typing code. It was no fun at all when you were typing assembly snippets and memory location numbers that didn't mean anything to anyone who wasn't in the programmer's head.
I think I saw one of these in a hotel in Alberta ! It's just desk furniture now; (but) Apparently they sporadically used it in some sort of ledger system before becoming part of a larger chain (2000'), but foxing/bleed/decay made long-term archival of those records 'difficult' at best .
Fast forward to today, when it's still faster to google "restaurantname city menu" than scan their dirty, greasy QR codes that are likely coming unstuck from the table. History repeats itself.
I find this to be true in supermarkets and other places that cheap-out on scanning equipment. IME scanning a loyalty card at Lidl or Tesco increases the length of my shop by at least two minutes (Because I have to dig phone out of bag, unlock phone, open loyalty barcode, yadda yadda) compared to not bothering with -exposing my retail data- collecting loyalty points, though Tesco stores which allow manual keying cut this down to 15 seconds. 😇 That said; Assuming you're talking about Plessy pens, those things (At least as used in British libraries) could scan at a very surprising speed for their vintage... 🖊💨😳
I used to love BYTE. I subscribed to it up until the end. Then they promised to fill in the balance of my subscription with one to another magazine, but I never received it. I do have a lot of the physical magazines, though, and the BYTE CD that was issued a couple of times.
Around '88 or so, tax laws were changing so that you could soon no longer write off a magazine subscription. So they had a special offer for a 5 year subscription, and I went for it. By the time '93 rolled around, it had changed enough that it was no longer a magazine that I wanted to continue subscribing to.
I remember in the early days of the internet there was a program called PaperDisk that let you print a file and then read it back (hopefully) using a regular scanner (which was crazy expensive at the time).
Thanks for the video. This is the kind of stuff I show my son to make him understand that we didn't have Internet back in the day.... Distribution and transmitting information was so different!
I'm old enough, my country was backward enough, and my family was technophobic enough that I remember my mother having to go down to the phone booth to speak to her friends and organise stuff. When I started we already had phones at home, but it took till I was fifteen till it became possible to reorganise a plan after everybody had already left their home. Something critical comes up and your friend is already on the way? Tough, they get to wait for you for half an hour till they get angry enough to leave.
I actually remember these rather well - there were programs on softstrip in the back of either MacUser or MacWorld (I don't remember which one - we had subscriptions to both). We never had the device, but I do remember wanting one at the time (although the swap-a-floppy table at our local Macintosh User Group did kind of temper that somewhat).
Such a cool device. I had a similar idea in the late '80s, early '90s when I discovered a little book in the library that went through the whole process of converting your (MSX compatible) printer into a B&W scanner. I remember thinking "If your printer can print images, you can also convert data into images and print those and if you can turn your printer into a scanner, you can also tell it to "load" data you printed earlier. And since I was a teenager with illusions of grandeur it never got any further than a couple of drawings and a couple of text files explaining the concept. I do remember it was supposed to use graphical drawing characters from the MSX's own character set, mostly because I barely knew how to print any characters, let alone true graphics.
I watched this and it brought back painful.memories. Typing in a whole game in hexadecimal and finding out one month later, after it failed and having deleted it, there were typos in the magazine.
What they should have done is have the user cut the strips out, join them end for end and then roll them up. They could then have had a much smaller unit that used the motor to pul the "tape" past a reader head... Oh, wait, no..... 🤔
Epson printers were the bees knees back in the day. Their only real weakness was price, and you really needed to use Epson ribbons with their printers. The cheap aftermarket ribbons were often water based, and the Epson ribbons were oil based. and the Epson printhead needed that oil to lubricate the pins in the printhead. When i worked at computerland, we replaced so many Epson printheads because people bought an expensive printer, and then put cheap ribbons into it.
Interesting and one could say it's a predecessor to the CueCat which was a similar idea to Link physical texts with digital data kind of in the opposite way once everything went Internet. Fascinating never heard of it before what a crazy idea. And yes it suffers from the first design problem like the mouse with the cord going the wrong way.
So great to finally see one of these in action. As a kid I would see ads for it in Family Computing and would imagine what it would be like to just be able to scan the programs in instead of typing them!
I vividly remember the Softstrip advertisements in Family Computing Magazine and Compute Magazine (which were the computer magazines I subscribed to at the time.) I remember very much wanting one as I typed in programs. I seem to remember program listings in Softstrip, but I perused a couple old issues and found the ads, but no actual program listings that were not part of the ads - so my memory might be faulty. Fun fact. HEDS stands for Hewlett Packard Emitter Detector System (or Sensor - can't remember). The HEDS component prefix was used for many products produced by the Optoelectronics Division of HP.
I remember seeing the softstrip reader advertised in Nibble magazine and the printed softstrips they included for a while. It looked interesting at the time, but I never bought one. It didn't take too long to just type in the programs I was interested in. Finding and fixing all the mistakes I made was part of the learning experience.
That pdf of the magazine is a real rabbit hole... I'm watching an analog interpretation of a digital data stream that shows me a digitally stored copy of an analog printout of digital logic.
Interesting concept and a kind of evolution of card readers really. As others have commented, if this had come out in 1976 it could have been quite something. Back in 1985 or so this just seems a little dated and very limited and I could imagine a lot of issues with calibration and tolerances. Also the point of a lot of listings in those days was to learn programming by typing. At least for me the cassette was good enough for storage for storing my programmes. Disks were for the rich kids... yes those 1541 drives were always too expensive in the UK.
I remember playing with this back in school, somehow our school was given one. I scanned a strip that I found in an Apple II magazine, as I remember they tested the waters to see if there was interest in the format. I remember being fascinated by it but since I had a floppy drive, I didn't see the point.
ive come across one of those when i was scrapping a big pile of various computer shit at a thrift store i was working for. thats pretty cool didnt know what it did and almost certainly busted it open with a large mallet and took the circuitry out of it 😂 there was a big pile of computer stuff that had sat outside in the elements for years and it was my job to break em down and sell the silicon and copper at the scrap yard
Wow, I've never heard of this tech. It was definitely ahead of its time! It's not too dissimilar to QR codes today, except most just point you to a website. Even though you could encode a very small program or script on a QR code, directly.
I remember hearing about it I think in Byte back in the 90s. It was a casual reference to it but they never showed an image or detailed how it worked. Just a mention on how you could scan in software from pages via that method. Good to know those things actually existed and what they actually looked like.
Thanks for doing this. I wanted one of these readers as a kid, in 1984/5 when the strips started showing up in magazines. It woulda beat typing the program in, but I didn't have the bucks. There was a much, much smaller reader available for a time. It read a strip cut out of the magazine. Either you moved it over the strip, or the strip fed into the hand-sized reader.
This is a very cool device. I don't find the fact that it only supported output to Epson MX/FX 80 to be an issue because nearly all 9 pin printers of the day supported Epson emulation. Now the Imagewriter was not epson compatible as it used the C. Itoh printer escape codes and the program already supports this. I always wondered for a long time why someone didn't develop a system like this. Well, now I found out that it was done. I didn't even know about this until now. Too bad they didn't make a version for the C64 but it did not have directly compatible RS-232 the way IBM and Apple did. Yes, I know there were RS-232 adapters for the user port and for the IEC bus.
Back in the early 90's, while staying at a friend's house, I typed all of Nibbler onto some 80's era pc from a book that had a collection of these magazine programs in it. Unfortunately, there was no way to save anything on that PC (I was a hand-me-down to the kids and didn't have a peripheral for saving anything) and I never got the game running before we were ordered to shut down and go to bed.
Portable Computer Magazine (PCM) made "BAREAD" starting in their April 1984 issue which had each line of a BASIC type-in as a barcode that you scanned into your TRS-80 Model 100 as an alternative to typing it in on such a small screen
I remember the tedious process of typing programs into my TRS-80 that were printed in Rainbow magazine. I bought an 80's era CNC machine and it had a punched tape reader in it. Fortunately it also had a serial port.
Well atleast it's possible for an Atari to decode a QR code with the right shit Easily can store 64kilobytes in one And with the XL and later you don't need a serial port Use the pbi for hi speed loading
@the8ctagon Because redesigning the hardware would require a time machine to go back in time and try to negotiate with the company that originally designed it. And if you think of it, how would you even know what the exact date to travel to would be? If you go too early they wouldn't know what you're talking about, and if you go too late they might have already submitted the designs to the manufacturer. You can't just change the terms of a contract just because some random guy from the future told you to. On top of that, how are you going to convince the person at the front desk to even listen to you? They'd probably think you're a crazy person. It's probably easier to just turn the book around.
I mean... I probably wouldn't have done it. It is a great play on words. Full points for that. But... 1) You're really going to place a cap on how seriously the product will be taken. And 2) the tech industry already had enough of a boy's-club air about it, it didn't that kind of help. OTOH, what's done is done. It's all very much past-tense now, and we could all probably stand to lighten up a little.
Thanks for posting this! I had one of these and have never found any reference to it anywhere. I thought it worked okay but I never really used it much. I had great plans for it but they never materialized.
I do recall seeing a piece on tv (in UK) back in the late 80s or perhaps early 90s where someone had made a way to create full page barcodes that were being used to archive data in a form that was had a higher longevity than magnetic media.
I remember Tomorrow's World doing something like that in the late 90s. I think with the program Paperdsk (though there were others). They even had an example you could print out and rescan with the software that contained a video of the TW intro. It was pretty cool. None of these programs were successful, mainly because they were proprietary formats and expensive encoding software making it hard to widespread adoption. There is a modern free open source program Paperbak that does the same thing.
Fascinating! Thanks for the detailed video on this unusual accessory. I loved Byte magazine, the depth and breadth of the articles and the iconic cover art. Here in the UK, it wasn't widely available in stores until the early 80's as I recall, but I ended up with around 100 issues. Sadly I had to make space when moving house and I no longer have them, but I remember many of the articles and advertisements that get featured on this channel.
Byte magazine had Steve ciarcia, among others. I’m a little surprised they didn’t ask one of them to write a series of articles about building a barcode reader for their paperbyte.
Just finished watching, after my previous comment. We weren’t Byte subscribers- but we did subscribe to InCider and A+ for Apple II. I strongly remember softstrip prints being available in those magazines. We also had a subscription where Cauzin themselves sent us programs - they came in little pamphlets, I seem to remember a silver or red cover.
With a partner in crime, around 1980, we developed a code, called "Bytewrite," that could easily print short programs as long as they could be expressed in 127-bit ASCII in 62-byte chunks. Any printer could handle it, even low resolution ones. To read it, all you needed was an HP barcode wand for $99. It failed to catch on since programs were getting bigger and data storage was getting cheaper.
Wow! I remember reading about these in the Village Voice back in '85 or '86, the year before I began my own career in IT. I always wondered what became of them.
I think you referenced this: writing a decoder that can take an image and spit out code shouldn't be too tough. That was the first thing that came to mind. Take all those pages w soft strips from Byte, and output the associated files. Might be a cool way to archive those files.
RS232 was never easy to configure. Even computer engineers struggled with non-standard standards. We built "break out" boxes that allowed us to quickly reconfig the wires including adding LEDs to a channel. One headache was the lack of "crossover" standard, where some machines crossed channel and some did not. And every company thought it was doing it the "right" way.
I remember getting software on an "Eva-Tone Sound Sheet." ICYDK, these were thin plastic 45 rpm records that were occasionally to be found in mass circulation magazines like National Geographic. You could play them on a standard record player (after taping a penny to them b/c they were so flimsy). The quality was not very good but they were cheap to produce. IIRC the Beatles made one and mailed it to their fan club ~1964. The "ROM" version was basically a recording of the cassette output from a computer (Kansas City standard). To get it to work, you put the sound sheet on a record player and recorded the sounds into a cassette deck. At that point you'd have a cassette version of the software. It was very difficult to get it to work (on a TRS-80) IIRC.
Definitely interesting tech of the past.. though wasn't there a MIT project of similar nature recently using shapes with colours printed offering "massive" ability to backup data?
I know that's part of the technology that went into something that ended up as the Microsoft TAG, but I also vaguely remember some more recent research along those lines.
@@simontay4851 It's a video by MattKC from about 4 years ago. He managed to get a simple game of Snake in a large QR code that stores a little less than 3KB. Similar in size to the programs on here.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Though loading software form paper predates the efforts by Byte. The DEC PDP series of computers used paper tape to load software into memory.
It looks like it was more of a 'too late' problem. As you mentioned, with the popularization of BBSs and the lower costs of disk drives (well, both in America; here in Europe it would have a chance, I believe, because we were a tape continent through the 80s and there were not a lot of local BBSs, at least in some countries) seems like space and distribution were a problem quickly being solved. Also, the size of the programs were a bit small for that era in PCs (again, in Europe, we used 8 bits computers for a long time, so it would stand a chance, i think). Anyway, I never heard of this type of distribution and it's fascinating! Thanks for the video!
Boy … that is going back into the dinosaur bone computer pile. I remember wanting one of these but never got it. Another item using the same idea was the Radio Shack optical pen for the TRS-80 Model-100 that could read barcode.
I remember countless hours spent typing source code from magazines into my C64... It was very frustrating, so much so that I started to learn programming by myself when I was 12, starting what would become my career as a software developer.
The simple readability of BASIC listings - nice, apart from those ones which basically contained hexdumps. Acceptable for a little sequence of assembler, but I remember one for the BBC Micro which contained a picture of Jem from the Dark Crystal.
I had this. I really liked it actually. Let me experiment with all kinds of things on my Apple //c. I otherwise wouldn’t have the patience to type in as a kid, and my brother and I had a book of stuff we printed. Lost to time though, but wow - it was fun.
Many years ago, when i had a C64, i had a magazine (maybe a bought one, i don't remember) with a program printed in hexadecimal code spread over multiple pages. You needed a special program to type it in. As far as i can remember there was a checksum. After many typing over many hours, you had the program. I think the program i typed in was a small game.
My good school friend got an Atari 600XL (yes, the 16kB version of 800XL) bare. We used to gather after school painstakingly retyping the programs from magazines for hours. Each time we had had few attempts to run code, few minutes of debugging each typo or omission, and then voila - half an hour of play until we got bored. Remember the shimmering coming for who is to turn the power off finally to get all this work into oblivion.
Such a cool device! Makes me wonder how many bytes we could print on a single page today, using the original format specs but printing full pages (not strips) on a modern laser printer and scanning with a phone camera. Speaking of, making an app that can read those old strips would be a useless and fun project!
The softstrip was the inspiration for a project of mine. I had an Epson LX400 and an Atari ST 520STM. I glued a light sensor and a light to the printer head. I wired it to the Rom port with some simple amplifier. I wanted to be able to print barcode like lines and read them back with the sensor. I ran into a lot of problems, reading the bytes back. The best results i got was with endless paper, but even then the reading back was unreliable at best. I put in a lot of work trying to get the errors down, sifting the paper up and down, reading on the forward and backward move, tried different width of lines, and shapes, combine multiple passes, added a 4bit AD-converter with a resistor ladder to get better data, but i gave up on that after a few months. I was so disappointed i deleted everything and threw my build hardware into the trash. Now I'm a litte bit sad about that.
@9:15 - Turn the magazine upside-down. If it caught on, and people immediately found this flaw, they'd have started printing the strips the other way up, I'm sure. Printed high-density codes like this are great for archival stuff. Archival paper and ink in a stable environment can last hundreds, if not thousands of years.
i was just thinking how great this would be to print things for archiving but the way to do this is with microfilm. you can look up photos of dolby stereo or sony dynamic digital sound on film. god only knows what someone could do if the entire width of a 35mm film strip were formatted to store digital data like that. sony dynamic digital has a bit rate of 2.2 megabits per second using just the outer edge of the film, about 2mm. So using the full 35mm would mean around 400 megabits per second. At 24pfs, that means 16.7 Mb per frame. The 800 bytes that this format could do with a strip on A4 paper would be 0.04% of a single frame. the standard reel of 35mm is 1000ft long running for 11 minutes, so that's about 250GB. English Wikipedia is 26GB.
There was such a device advertised in Greek magazines of the era. I remember there was also a presentation/test of one. I can't recall if it was made by Cauzin. But the strips actually look similar. It never got any popularity here. People were still using cassette based systems back then (ZX Spectrum, TI-99, Amstrad...) and some magazines (for specific models) would come with cover tapes. Most greek magazines had type-ins. By the time these disappeared, people had moved to floppy disk systems.
15:55 When even the supplier admits they can't really do more than 65K (...WTF? That would be "64K"...), the writing is on the wall - program sizes were clearly going to go up soon, but they had no real way to increase the density (therefore storage limits) any further. This system was only ever going to be useful for a very specific, narrow slice of time while code size would remain fairly small.
Casio had a keyboard (read: musical instrument, not QWERTY) that used a barcode reader similar to the HP one you show. And it was about the same time. As opposed to more recent keyboards that have a hundred songs built in - back then, the songs were instead provided as barcodes printed on paper.
My dad had a Tandy CoCo II in the early 80s, when I was around 6-8. It hooked to the TV, and had no way to save. He also had the Radio Shack book, Getting Started with Extended Color Basic, which somehow I learned how to use, laying on the floor. I would scan the pages, looking for something not too long that I could type in, and then spend an hour diligently typing in every character. I was a very long way from being able to touch type (learned that in high school), so it was very tedious, hunt and peck data entry. Then I'd be blown away when they worked, and the screen filled with colorful lines, or whatever. Then I would say "Dad! Don't unplug this!", because all my work would be gone 😆
Good day to you Tech Tangents, I always enjoy your videos. They certainly had quirky technology back in the day. I wish I would have been able to enjoy the golden era more. I find modern technology incredibly boring. Its nice to see channels like this with such great content.
I remember when this came out. Scholastic's Family Computing would print these in their magazine. A shame they never made it work for Atari computers. I remember it worked with Apple ][ computers.
I remember seeing those strips in Byte... (I don't miss those dot-matrix printers at all... Having a laser printer for less than $200 is a miracle, given the first laser printer I saw around 1982 cost a thousand times more.) They were done on a HP flatbed plotter driven by a HP9847 smart terminal running HP Basic. In 1980, the first serious IT job I had was to make barcodes for a portable computer that did not have a keyboard, but a book with barcodes for values that were to be entered. It was for data entry emulating a mark sense system. The barcode book would have essentially the same layout as the sheets, but spreaded on several pages (because the barcodes were bigger than the mark sense bubbles). The data would then be uploaded in a batch over a modem. The computer was to be embedded in the back cover of a binder with the barcode sheets.
I'm surpised that no one seems to have brought up the Nintendo e-Reader. The e-Reader was an add-on for the Game Boy advance that read software from 2-D barcode strips printed on playing cards.
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Casually mentioning that you have a complete collection of BYTE magazines is a great flex.
I had TWO magazine subscription as a little girl.
Tiger Beat and BYTE. LOL!
Seriously it's such a fun magazine to leaf through! I wish I had more of them, but only have the one where they review the new MC68030.
And nice investment collection that will only increase in value!
I really miss Byte. It was a great magazine.
The only ones I kept are the ones I'm in. I did a couple product reviews back in the day.
I worked for Cauzin. I wrote the Mac app that printed SoftStrips on the Apple ImageWriter dot matrix printer, and also participated in the programming of the Laser Archivist. I'm still in touch with a few of the people I worked with at Cauzin. Thanks for this video, it was an enjoyable walk down memory lane.
Send this video to em XD
@@WackoPaco Was the system documented anywhere? I've idly considered using a flatbed scanner to read these things in. There were a few books that had some fairly long programs on them.
@@NoSpam1891 Any such documentation that I may have had in my possession has vanished into forgotten realms, along with my 128K Macintosh. 🙁
It’s awesome to see one of the OG devs drop in via the comments. Thank you!
In the (semi)modern day, the Nintendo DSi had a programming environment available for purchase on its DSi Shop called Petit Computer. Programs could be exported into files that could be shared with other systems. However, due to Nintendo policy, files could not be imported directly. The workaround for this was a QR code scanner. On the Petit Computer was a website with a Flash applet that would convert a Petit Computer export into a series of QR codes in PNG images.
The GBA had an accessory called the e-Reader which could load in data from little dot based bar codes on cards that you swiped, I wonder if anyone has ever reverse engineered those?
@@BeaverDaBeaverThey have been reverse engineered down to being able to write GBA executable programs. The dot codeson eReader cards are actually less fine than the Soft Strip dot codes, with a little printer tuning, you can print your own with ease.
Fun fact: One of the most successful 3DS exploits relied on the level sharing functionality the game Cubic Ninja had, it produced QR codes for custom levels but the game didn't have enough checks to prevent arbitrary code execution, thus, Ninjhax was born.
Ahh I remember Petit Computer, the follow up on 3DS was released under the name Smile BASIC, and we also got the revision of it for Switch too. I had a ton of fun with projects from the community on both the DSi and 3DS versions but don't think I ever made anything all that good on it. I never got to try the Switch version as I never got a Switch.
@@JORGETECHJorgeI remember that! That was the first widely available exploit for the console. I still have my exploited cartridge on a shelf. The game itself... was so simple people were confused why it had a cartridge release, but it was convenient.
This looks like a precursor to QR and that tech is already fascinating to me. to see they were doing something similar in 1985 is so cool!
I love how perfectly retrofuturistic those printouts look. You wouldn't be surprised if you saw these strips in any sci-fi with robots.
Pro Tip: The EPSON FX80 printer uses the same ESC/P (Epson Standard Code for Printers) as many many many other printers that are EPSON compatible.
Indeed. I had an option card for my HP Inkjet 500 printer that supported it. Drop it in and it's Epson FX80 compatible.
So thats what ESC/P stands for... Lol... I am an IT officer in food distribution office, installing and troubleshooting probably hundreds of Epson Dot matrik printer from LQ 2180,2190,LX 300,and LX 310 in my office for more than a decade and this is how I finally knew what it stands for...
I believe it’s evolved to become the ESC-POS standard for dedicated Point Of Sale printers, many are sold by Epson and Star. I had to write an emulator a few years back that could take ESC-POS commands and output a PDF document that could be emailed. Legal requirement required the emailed version had to look the same as the printed version.
@@bpcgosthat protocol is I think still used in many printers today, not just epson but other brands too
I hacked up a tool to convert ESC/P graphics into PDF some time ago. If there's a use case for it, I could look it up and put it somewhere public.
So, a squashed mosquito on the paper can be a real bug in the code.
Um, yes. The original "bug" was a dead moth causing a partial short circuit inside an old vacuum tube computer.
@@deusexaetherathe moth chewed through a wire I believe
@@michealpersicko9531It got stuck in the contacts of a relay preventing them from closing and making contact.
This seems like an archaic QR code. Very cool video!
The term you're looking for is "predecessor." I had one of those HP barcode wands. Get off my lawn!
If you think the "Stripper" name was suggestive, there was also a program (not by Cauzin) for serial port data transfer between two PCs (similar to LapLink) called "PC Hooker"... I guess because you hook together the two machines via a cable?
i think we've failed as a society when people find humor like this annoying and not amusing. but what do i know, i just speak peepeeweewee
@@herzogsbuick That's because it *is* annoying and not amusing.
But was it printed with the Stripper?
@@herzogsbuick I'd go with "lame".
@@vwestlife eh, tastes. I much prefer tongue-in-cheek over the obsession about everything being formal and proper. Political correctness be damned, there has always been a need for software with a sense of humour, even if it was sometimes a bit puerile. This is even more true today, with corporations prioritising avoiding the wrath of karens at any cost over having any fun. Thanks for coming to my TED talk, and keep kicking the llama's ass.
Funny and true story. I used to work at computerland in the mid 80's. We had a real issue with IBM PC's and memory problems. Customers would run jobs overnight, just to come in in the morning to find the computer had crashed, and no data was available as to where the memory fault was. I created a device (quite a simple one) that took the NMI for parity error and latched in the high 4 bits of the address bus, so you would know which bank of memory was bad.
I called it a PECKER, short for Parity chECKER. That was immediately vetoed by the management of my store (for obvious reasons). Nobody said computer geeks are not socially awkward, and prone to off color humor.
IME, subtlety goes a long way. It seems you can get away with something that can be interpreted as off-color if you shroud it in legitimacy. Because then there's always that shadow of a doubt... "Did they _know?_ They had to have known.... right?" Let the conservative folks live in the comfort of their innocence, and those who want to be in on the joke can assume whatever they'd like.
To this day, I'm convinced that Bezos mastered the art of subtle trolling. The Amazon mark on the boxes? The rocket? You can't convince me this guy wasn't trying to sneak eggplant emojis everywhere he could. It just seems like the kind of thing he'd do.
I remember the premier TRS-80 magazine, had a service called "load 80" where you could buy all the programs in the issue on tape and have them delivered to your house.
Of course, i could not afford this, and learned a whole LOT about troubleshooting not only basic, but assembler and machine code. Computing was hard mode, back in the day.
Softstrips can also be found in the pages of Nibble magazine for the Apple II. Oh and the Apple //c had two 6551 ACIA (Asynchronous Communication Interface Adapters) in it. Providing two completely independent serial ports.
Indeed, I remember an Apple magazine having them too. I have a vague memory of being in a study hall in high school and a friend showing me these long strips in a magazine. Wasn't a magazine called AppleIncider or something like that. But I do recall seeing them in a magazine other than Byte.
You covered the Cauzin on the PC much better than I could have. Outstanding work, Shelby.
Thank you! I went through a few revision of my script on this one as I kept digging. When I first found out about Paperbytes it was nearly a complete rewrite hah. I still think I could have shown a few more examples of it scanning, but focusing more on the era around it felt like right call to keep it tight.
There is a version of printing code to paper as a bitmap and using a scanner to read it into the system. It's called Paperback . It was originally a Proof of Concept joke to explain something that's grown to have a nich crowd. While it has been used to encode an entire program it is mainly used to store passwords that can be hand delivered or even sent in the US Mail without anyone reading it. It's biggest drawback was that even with the best resolution printing and scanning a sheet of typing paper still stored less than 4 Gigs of information and with lower resolutions it was more often less than 300 MB. Still some argued that with a shelf life of more than 100 years backing up data on paper can make sense.
@@stephenroot1012 That's apparently impossible to google. Do you have a resource to look up by something other than "paperback"?
@@alexcrouseSorry about getting wordy most of what was written was how it work, why would anyone use it and how long would the data last in this format ( from about 100 years for regular copy paper to about 5000 years if one takes a laser cutter to etch a file on a polished slab of stone).
@@alexcrouse I posted a link in this subset but I don't see it. There is another copy of the link to the original version ( only about 3M per sheet of paper) in the main comments with my username.
Hey, I recommend shifting your books to the front of the shelves. It helps with air circulation and is better for the books to prevent mold. I worked at a library for a while and that's where I learned that tidbit. Good libraries will have their items on the front of the shelf, not pushed to the back.
The chance of mold here in Arizona is practically nil 🙂
Huh. Not very useful where I live since it's not that humid, but good to know anyhow
I don't have a library (At my pay grade?!? ♿🇬🇧🏚) so I can't speak from experience, but I think this can be made much easier to achieve by simply having a piece of batten (Sawn wood) at the back of the shelf so when the books/mags are pushed home (As we all do) they stop at the batten, not at the back of the shelf. This makes airflow circulation easier to achieve _without_ having to push and pull books to achieve this, reducing further wear/tear on them. 💡😇
This needed to be released in 1975, not 1984 or 85. Outside of the magazines, there was no need for it. Even the magazines could easily have just put all their stuff on BBS.
It didn't catch on because it just had no reasonable use case by the time it came out. There were software stores everywhere by 1985. Not only did they sell expensive software, they also usually carried lower end software and even free ware on diskette or tape. This was usually very low priced for a disk with 20 different programs on it of various quality.
My immediate thought when the video started was "this is solving the expense of floppy drives as floppy drives are rapidly plummeting in price"
He says theres no one reason it failed, theres just no reason it would succeed.
Also comparing it to the failed 1541 is ridiculous - that thing basically killed the Commodore. Every other disc was 10x faster and less than half the price. A PC floppy drive was half the cost of this, if you had a controller.
@@mycosysThe 1541 definitely killed the Commodore. The C64 was basically stillborn, and definitely didn't come close to being the best-selling 8-bit computer of all time.
@@mycosys First, there is the fact that I did not compare it to the 1541, so there's that. But second, the 64 was the best selling computer of all time to this day. Commodore died because the home computer died in the 90s.
@@CptJistuce Best selling computer of all time to this day. At least by the metric of being a single computer model.
The typing was possibly the best part of the process. Debugging was also extremely useful. Learning was maximized by the manual effort.
Yes, as an extreme example I learned from Pascal books that presented and explained the code, that needed to be typed in.
@JohnDlugosz it was a wonderful time
Typing was fun when you were typing code. It was no fun at all when you were typing assembly snippets and memory location numbers that didn't mean anything to anyone who wasn't in the programmer's head.
I think I saw one of these in a hotel in Alberta ! It's just desk furniture now;
(but) Apparently they sporadically used it in some sort of ledger system before becoming part of a larger chain (2000'), but foxing/bleed/decay made long-term archival of those records 'difficult' at best .
I used to work in a library that had those pen style barcode scanners. I was genuinely faster at just entering the number via the keypad.
Fast forward to today, when it's still faster to google "restaurantname city menu" than scan their dirty, greasy QR codes that are likely coming unstuck from the table. History repeats itself.
I find this to be true in supermarkets and other places that cheap-out on scanning equipment. IME scanning a loyalty card at Lidl or Tesco increases the length of my shop by at least two minutes (Because I have to dig phone out of bag, unlock phone, open loyalty barcode, yadda yadda) compared to not bothering with -exposing my retail data- collecting loyalty points, though Tesco stores which allow manual keying cut this down to 15 seconds. 😇
That said; Assuming you're talking about Plessy pens, those things (At least as used in British libraries) could scan at a very surprising speed for their vintage... 🖊💨😳
Large format Nintendo E-Reader! Love it!
Shhh, he mentions at 10:24 how scarred he is from trying to print THOSE out :p
I used to love BYTE. I subscribed to it up until the end. Then they promised to fill in the balance of my subscription with one to another magazine, but I never received it. I do have a lot of the physical magazines, though, and the BYTE CD that was issued a couple of times.
Around '88 or so, tax laws were changing so that you could soon no longer write off a magazine subscription. So they had a special offer for a 5 year subscription, and I went for it. By the time '93 rolled around, it had changed enough that it was no longer a magazine that I wanted to continue subscribing to.
I remember in the early days of the internet there was a program called PaperDisk that let you print a file and then read it back (hopefully) using a regular scanner (which was crazy expensive at the time).
Thanks for the video. This is the kind of stuff I show my son to make him understand that we didn't have Internet back in the day.... Distribution and transmitting information was so different!
I'm old enough, my country was backward enough, and my family was technophobic enough that I remember my mother having to go down to the phone booth to speak to her friends and organise stuff. When I started we already had phones at home, but it took till I was fifteen till it became possible to reorganise a plan after everybody had already left their home. Something critical comes up and your friend is already on the way? Tough, they get to wait for you for half an hour till they get angry enough to leave.
I actually remember these rather well - there were programs on softstrip in the back of either MacUser or MacWorld (I don't remember which one - we had subscriptions to both). We never had the device, but I do remember wanting one at the time (although the swap-a-floppy table at our local Macintosh User Group did kind of temper that somewhat).
Such a cool device.
I had a similar idea in the late '80s, early '90s when I discovered a little book in the library that went through the whole process of converting your (MSX compatible) printer into a B&W scanner. I remember thinking "If your printer can print images, you can also convert data into images and print those and if you can turn your printer into a scanner, you can also tell it to "load" data you printed earlier. And since I was a teenager with illusions of grandeur it never got any further than a couple of drawings and a couple of text files explaining the concept. I do remember it was supposed to use graphical drawing characters from the MSX's own character set, mostly because I barely knew how to print any characters, let alone true graphics.
I watched this and it brought back painful.memories. Typing in a whole game in hexadecimal and finding out one month later, after it failed and having deleted it, there were typos in the magazine.
What they should have done is have the user cut the strips out, join them end for end and then roll them up. They could then have had a much smaller unit that used the motor to pul the "tape" past a reader head... Oh, wait, no..... 🤔
Should we call it paper tape?
Epson printers were the bees knees back in the day. Their only real weakness was price, and you really needed to use Epson ribbons with their printers. The cheap aftermarket ribbons were often water based, and the Epson ribbons were oil based. and the Epson printhead needed that oil to lubricate the pins in the printhead.
When i worked at computerland, we replaced so many Epson printheads because people bought an expensive printer, and then put cheap ribbons into it.
And here I thought everybody simply WD40'd the ribbons till there were no more atoms of ink left in them.
I remember getting my Family Computing magazine and typing in the programs. They always had 2-3. Silly stuff mostly.
Interesting and one could say it's a predecessor to the CueCat which was a similar idea to Link physical texts with digital data kind of in the opposite way once everything went Internet. Fascinating never heard of it before what a crazy idea. And yes it suffers from the first design problem like the mouse with the cord going the wrong way.
So great to finally see one of these in action. As a kid I would see ads for it in Family Computing and would imagine what it would be like to just be able to scan the programs in instead of typing them!
Softstrips were also available for a time in TRS-80 focused magazines. Always wanted a reader for them!
I vividly remember the Softstrip advertisements in Family Computing Magazine and Compute Magazine (which were the computer magazines I subscribed to at the time.) I remember very much wanting one as I typed in programs. I seem to remember program listings in Softstrip, but I perused a couple old issues and found the ads, but no actual program listings that were not part of the ads - so my memory might be faulty.
Fun fact. HEDS stands for Hewlett Packard Emitter Detector System (or Sensor - can't remember). The HEDS component prefix was used for many products produced by the Optoelectronics Division of HP.
I remember seeing the softstrip reader advertised in Nibble magazine and the printed softstrips they included for a while. It looked interesting at the time, but I never bought one. It didn't take too long to just type in the programs I was interested in. Finding and fixing all the mistakes I made was part of the learning experience.
Holy cow! I never knew this existed, and i thought i was up to date on 80's tech.
That pdf of the magazine is a real rabbit hole...
I'm watching an analog interpretation of a digital data stream that shows me a digitally stored copy of an analog printout of digital logic.
Interesting concept and a kind of evolution of card readers really. As others have commented, if this had come out in 1976 it could have been quite something. Back in 1985 or so this just seems a little dated and very limited and I could imagine a lot of issues with calibration and tolerances.
Also the point of a lot of listings in those days was to learn programming by typing. At least for me the cassette was good enough for storage for storing my programmes. Disks were for the rich kids... yes those 1541 drives were always too expensive in the UK.
I subscribed to Nibble magazine from around '84 - '90, and I'm pretty sure I remember seeing these strips in there. Wish I'd saved those magazines.
I remember playing with this back in school, somehow our school was given one. I scanned a strip that I found in an Apple II magazine, as I remember they tested the waters to see if there was interest in the format. I remember being fascinated by it but since I had a floppy drive, I didn't see the point.
ive come across one of those when i was scrapping a big pile of various computer shit at a thrift store i was working for. thats pretty cool didnt know what it did and almost certainly busted it open with a large mallet and took the circuitry out of it 😂 there was a big pile of computer stuff that had sat outside in the elements for years and it was my job to break em down and sell the silicon and copper at the scrap yard
When renaming those driver names actualy worked as you intended - man that must have felt great
Wow, I've never heard of this tech. It was definitely ahead of its time! It's not too dissimilar to QR codes today, except most just point you to a website. Even though you could encode a very small program or script on a QR code, directly.
I remember hearing about it I think in Byte back in the 90s. It was a casual reference to it but they never showed an image or detailed how it worked. Just a mention on how you could scan in software from pages via that method. Good to know those things actually existed and what they actually looked like.
I don’t remember ever seeing anything about this back in the day. Really cool!
Awesome video as always! I had no clue anyone ever tried this "barcode" software distribution.
I remember reading about this once, years ago, but never had any details. This was very interesting, thanks for making it!
Thanks for doing this. I wanted one of these readers as a kid, in 1984/5 when the strips started showing up in magazines. It woulda beat typing the program in, but I didn't have the bucks. There was a much, much smaller reader available for a time. It read a strip cut out of the magazine. Either you moved it over the strip, or the strip fed into the hand-sized reader.
This is a very cool device. I don't find the fact that it only supported output to Epson MX/FX 80 to be an issue because nearly all 9 pin printers of the day supported Epson emulation. Now the Imagewriter was not epson compatible as it used the C. Itoh printer escape codes and the program already supports this. I always wondered for a long time why someone didn't develop a system like this. Well, now I found out that it was done. I didn't even know about this until now. Too bad they didn't make a version for the C64 but it did not have directly compatible RS-232 the way IBM and Apple did. Yes, I know there were RS-232 adapters for the user port and for the IEC bus.
Back in the early 90's, while staying at a friend's house, I typed all of Nibbler onto some 80's era pc from a book that had a collection of these magazine programs in it. Unfortunately, there was no way to save anything on that PC (I was a hand-me-down to the kids and didn't have a peripheral for saving anything) and I never got the game running before we were ordered to shut down and go to bed.
Portable Computer Magazine (PCM) made "BAREAD" starting in their April 1984 issue which had each line of a BASIC type-in as a barcode that you scanned into your TRS-80 Model 100 as an alternative to typing it in on such a small screen
I remember the tedious process of typing programs into my TRS-80 that were printed in Rainbow magazine. I bought an 80's era CNC machine and it had a punched tape reader in it. Fortunately it also had a serial port.
0:25 weird looking QR code you got there
Well atleast it's possible for an Atari to decode a QR code with the right shit
Easily can store 64kilobytes in one
And with the XL and later you don't need a serial port
Use the pbi for hi speed loading
9:15 - Flip the book upside down.
I SCREAMED THAT AT MY LAPTOP!!! 😆
I was just going to say this 😂
My first thought, or even sideways.
Why not leave the book the right way up and design the hardware appropriately? Or was some other factor at play?
@the8ctagon Because redesigning the hardware would require a time machine to go back in time and try to negotiate with the company that originally designed it. And if you think of it, how would you even know what the exact date to travel to would be? If you go too early they wouldn't know what you're talking about, and if you go too late they might have already submitted the designs to the manufacturer. You can't just change the terms of a contract just because some random guy from the future told you to.
On top of that, how are you going to convince the person at the front desk to even listen to you? They'd probably think you're a crazy person.
It's probably easier to just turn the book around.
Lmao. Naming the software "The Stripper" is amazing
Well the 90s so...
The sighing about it makes me cringe far more than the name. Let life be silly.
I mean... I probably wouldn't have done it. It is a great play on words. Full points for that. But... 1) You're really going to place a cap on how seriously the product will be taken. And 2) the tech industry already had enough of a boy's-club air about it, it didn't that kind of help.
OTOH, what's done is done. It's all very much past-tense now, and we could all probably stand to lighten up a little.
Thanks for posting this! I had one of these and have never found any reference to it anywhere. I thought it worked okay but I never really used it much. I had great plans for it but they never materialized.
I do recall seeing a piece on tv (in UK) back in the late 80s or perhaps early 90s where someone had made a way to create full page barcodes that were being used to archive data in a form that was had a higher longevity than magnetic media.
I remember Tomorrow's World doing something like that in the late 90s. I think with the program Paperdsk (though there were others). They even had an example you could print out and rescan with the software that contained a video of the TW intro. It was pretty cool.
None of these programs were successful, mainly because they were proprietary formats and expensive encoding software making it hard to widespread adoption.
There is a modern free open source program Paperbak that does the same thing.
Fascinating! Thanks for the detailed video on this unusual accessory. I loved Byte magazine, the depth and breadth of the articles and the iconic cover art. Here in the UK, it wasn't widely available in stores until the early 80's as I recall, but I ended up with around 100 issues. Sadly I had to make space when moving house and I no longer have them, but I remember many of the articles and advertisements that get featured on this channel.
Byte magazine had Steve ciarcia, among others. I’m a little surprised they didn’t ask one of them to write a series of articles about building a barcode reader for their paperbyte.
Just finished watching, after my previous comment. We weren’t Byte subscribers- but we did subscribe to InCider and A+ for Apple II. I strongly remember softstrip prints being available in those magazines.
We also had a subscription where Cauzin themselves sent us programs - they came in little pamphlets, I seem to remember a silver or red cover.
With a partner in crime, around 1980, we developed a code, called "Bytewrite," that could easily print short programs as long as they could be expressed in 127-bit ASCII in 62-byte chunks. Any printer could handle it, even low resolution ones. To read it, all you needed was an HP barcode wand for $99. It failed to catch on since programs were getting bigger and data storage was getting cheaper.
Wow! I remember reading about these in the Village Voice back in '85 or '86, the year before I began my own career in IT. I always wondered what became of them.
I think you referenced this: writing a decoder that can take an image and spit out code shouldn't be too tough. That was the first thing that came to mind. Take all those pages w soft strips from Byte, and output the associated files. Might be a cool way to archive those files.
wow ure still going strong, yt didnt suggest you to me for years.. glad to be back
RS232 was never easy to configure. Even computer engineers struggled with non-standard standards. We built "break out" boxes that allowed us to quickly reconfig the wires including adding LEDs to a channel. One headache was the lack of "crossover" standard, where some machines crossed channel and some did not. And every company thought it was doing it the "right" way.
I remember getting software on an "Eva-Tone Sound Sheet." ICYDK, these were thin plastic 45 rpm records that were occasionally to be found in mass circulation magazines like National Geographic. You could play them on a standard record player (after taping a penny to them b/c they were so flimsy). The quality was not very good but they were cheap to produce. IIRC the Beatles made one and mailed it to their fan club ~1964.
The "ROM" version was basically a recording of the cassette output from a computer (Kansas City standard). To get it to work, you put the sound sheet on a record player and recorded the sounds into a cassette deck. At that point you'd have a cassette version of the software. It was very difficult to get it to work (on a TRS-80) IIRC.
This is so interesting! I truly appreciate the hard work and quality of your research on this topic. Thanks Shelby!
I like learning about old niche tech like this.
Awesome find. They look very similar to modern qr codes
@9:20 - Your informercial skills are top notch. I see a second career opportunity calling.
Wow! I've never seen or heard one of these. This is beyond brilliant.
Definitely interesting tech of the past.. though wasn't there a MIT project of similar nature recently using shapes with colours printed offering "massive" ability to backup data?
I know that's part of the technology that went into something that ended up as the Microsoft TAG, but I also vaguely remember some more recent research along those lines.
I saw a video here on RUclips a while back that investigated how big of a program could actually be stored in a QR code. Basically the same concept.
Barely anything. Only a very tiny simple dos program. QR codes usually just direct to a short URL.
@@simontay4851 It's a video by MattKC from about 4 years ago. He managed to get a simple game of Snake in a large QR code that stores a little less than 3KB. Similar in size to the programs on here.
@@simontay4851 there are dense color coded (CMYK) "QR", where each block are 2 bits
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Though loading software form paper predates the efforts by Byte. The DEC PDP series of computers used paper tape to load software into memory.
Of course paper tape predates this, but it used holes, like punch cards. And Jacquard machines? 🙄
It looks like it was more of a 'too late' problem. As you mentioned, with the popularization of BBSs and the lower costs of disk drives (well, both in America; here in Europe it would have a chance, I believe, because we were a tape continent through the 80s and there were not a lot of local BBSs, at least in some countries) seems like space and distribution were a problem quickly being solved. Also, the size of the programs were a bit small for that era in PCs (again, in Europe, we used 8 bits computers for a long time, so it would stand a chance, i think).
Anyway, I never heard of this type of distribution and it's fascinating! Thanks for the video!
Man I love modern times, but it’s so cool to see how people were finding technical solutions even if it was all for nothing.
Boy … that is going back into the dinosaur bone computer pile. I remember wanting one of these but never got it. Another item using the same idea was the Radio Shack optical pen for the TRS-80 Model-100 that could read barcode.
I remember countless hours spent typing source code from magazines into my C64... It was very frustrating, so much so that I started to learn programming by myself when I was 12, starting what would become my career as a software developer.
The simple readability of BASIC listings - nice, apart from those ones which basically contained hexdumps. Acceptable for a little sequence of assembler, but I remember one for the BBC Micro which contained a picture of Jem from the Dark Crystal.
I had this. I really liked it actually. Let me experiment with all kinds of things on my Apple //c. I otherwise wouldn’t have the patience to type in as a kid, and my brother and I had a book of stuff we printed. Lost to time though, but wow - it was fun.
Many years ago, when i had a C64, i had a magazine (maybe a bought one, i don't remember) with a program printed in hexadecimal code spread over multiple pages. You needed a special program to type it in. As far as i can remember there was a checksum. After many typing over many hours, you had the program. I think the program i typed in was a small game.
We had that at my middle school! Super cool and weird, even at the time. It was doomed, but it was fun.
Very interesting! I love obscure old HW, and I've indeed never heard of this.
My good school friend got an Atari 600XL (yes, the 16kB version of 800XL) bare. We used to gather after school painstakingly retyping the programs from magazines for hours. Each time we had had few attempts to run code, few minutes of debugging each typo or omission, and then voila - half an hour of play until we got bored. Remember the shimmering coming for who is to turn the power off finally to get all this work into oblivion.
Fascinating - thanks!
Why am I not surprised to find Big Car nerding out over here, given how you nerd out over cars it's really not a shock!
Such a cool device! Makes me wonder how many bytes we could print on a single page today, using the original format specs but printing full pages (not strips) on a modern laser printer and scanning with a phone camera. Speaking of, making an app that can read those old strips would be a useless and fun project!
I remember seeing those in magazines. The Headline for the ad was "Have you stripped yet?"
The softstrip was the inspiration for a project of mine. I had an Epson LX400 and an Atari ST 520STM. I glued a light sensor and a light to the printer head. I wired it to the Rom port with some simple amplifier. I wanted to be able to print barcode like lines and read them back with the sensor. I ran into a lot of problems, reading the bytes back. The best results i got was with endless paper, but even then the reading back was unreliable at best. I put in a lot of work trying to get the errors down, sifting the paper up and down, reading on the forward and backward move, tried different width of lines, and shapes, combine multiple passes, added a 4bit AD-converter with a resistor ladder to get better data, but i gave up on that after a few months. I was so disappointed i deleted everything and threw my build hardware into the trash. Now I'm a litte bit sad about that.
@9:15 - Turn the magazine upside-down. If it caught on, and people immediately found this flaw, they'd have started printing the strips the other way up, I'm sure. Printed high-density codes like this are great for archival stuff. Archival paper and ink in a stable environment can last hundreds, if not thousands of years.
i was just thinking how great this would be to print things for archiving but the way to do this is with microfilm. you can look up photos of dolby stereo or sony dynamic digital sound on film. god only knows what someone could do if the entire width of a 35mm film strip were formatted to store digital data like that.
sony dynamic digital has a bit rate of 2.2 megabits per second using just the outer edge of the film, about 2mm. So using the full 35mm would mean around 400 megabits per second. At 24pfs, that means 16.7 Mb per frame. The 800 bytes that this format could do with a strip on A4 paper would be 0.04% of a single frame.
the standard reel of 35mm is 1000ft long running for 11 minutes, so that's about 250GB. English Wikipedia is 26GB.
I remeber those strips, it was pretty cool... great video.
There was such a device advertised in Greek magazines of the era. I remember there was also a presentation/test of one. I can't recall if it was made by Cauzin. But the strips actually look similar. It never got any popularity here. People were still using cassette based systems back then (ZX Spectrum, TI-99, Amstrad...) and some magazines (for specific models) would come with cover tapes. Most greek magazines had type-ins. By the time these disappeared, people had moved to floppy disk systems.
I am so curious about reader head. Where can I find a advertisement with a diagram of it?
15:55 When even the supplier admits they can't really do more than 65K (...WTF? That would be "64K"...), the writing is on the wall - program sizes were clearly going to go up soon, but they had no real way to increase the density (therefore storage limits) any further. This system was only ever going to be useful for a very specific, narrow slice of time while code size would remain fairly small.
Casio had a keyboard (read: musical instrument, not QWERTY) that used a barcode reader similar to the HP one you show. And it was about the same time.
As opposed to more recent keyboards that have a hundred songs built in - back then, the songs were instead provided as barcodes printed on paper.
My dad had a Tandy CoCo II in the early 80s, when I was around 6-8. It hooked to the TV, and had no way to save. He also had the Radio Shack book, Getting Started with Extended Color Basic, which somehow I learned how to use, laying on the floor. I would scan the pages, looking for something not too long that I could type in, and then spend an hour diligently typing in every character. I was a very long way from being able to touch type (learned that in high school), so it was very tedious, hunt and peck data entry. Then I'd be blown away when they worked, and the screen filled with colorful lines, or whatever. Then I would say "Dad! Don't unplug this!", because all my work would be gone 😆
Had one of these in the campus computer lab I worked in in college. We never used it for much.
Good day to you Tech Tangents, I always enjoy your videos. They certainly had quirky technology back in the day. I wish I would have been able to enjoy the golden era more. I find modern technology incredibly boring. Its nice to see channels like this with such great content.
I remember when this came out. Scholastic's Family Computing would print these in their magazine. A shame they never made it work for Atari computers. I remember it worked with Apple ][ computers.
I grew up with Nintendo e-Reader so I definately was aware of this kind of tech.
I remember seeing those strips in Byte...
(I don't miss those dot-matrix printers at all... Having a laser printer for less than $200 is a miracle, given the first laser printer I saw around 1982 cost a thousand times more.) They were done on a HP flatbed plotter driven by a HP9847 smart terminal running HP Basic.
In 1980, the first serious IT job I had was to make barcodes for a portable computer that did not have a keyboard, but a book with barcodes for values that were to be entered.
It was for data entry emulating a mark sense system. The barcode book would have essentially the same layout as the sheets, but spreaded on several pages (because the barcodes were bigger than the mark sense bubbles).
The data would then be uploaded in a batch over a modem.
The computer was to be embedded in the back cover of a binder with the barcode sheets.
There is a program called paperbackup that can get about 1mb per A4 side. Had a play with it a few years ago. Interesting video.
I'm surpised that no one seems to have brought up the Nintendo e-Reader. The e-Reader was an add-on for the Game Boy advance that read software from 2-D barcode strips printed on playing cards.