Sorry for the long gap between videos. Life has been really busy this summer, especially my day job which has eaten up evenings and weekends. Decided to devote scarce free time to enjoying the pool than sitting in my office while the weather was good. But I did keep several projects moving along so you'll see those start popping up in September! Hope everyone has been having a great summer!
@@TechTimeTraveller It's not the audience that's upset with your irregular schedule, it's the Algorithm god and its servants. Take your time and have fun. Also one of my cats is also aptly named Kitty (in her native language though).
I started high school in 1995 and we had a Logitech (I think) roller hand scanner and would have been using Windows 3.1. I can't for the life of me remember if we could scan directly into Word for Windows. I thought I this comment was going to be more helpful until my brain just gave up. All I can remember is accidentally elongating my photograph and hoping that our (volatile) IT teacher wouldn't notice.
@@Metal_Maxine I had one of those about that time too, I recall you had to use its OCR software, but then again our computer got MS Works, I don't know about full blown office at the time... My dad mainly used it to scan receipts for his business
Cathode Ray Dude just a few weeks ago did a video on a page scanner from this era and mentioned the lack of videos about scanners online. Hope he sees this one 14:27 I have a backup of *most* of Xdrivers, if you want. I could try and find the driver or just send you a copy. Also, can I just say how thankful I am that you put good video and audio of the mechanism at work in the video? I love the sounds these things make.
Many thanks! Yes I started filming this 2 months ago but work kept preventing me from getting it done. And then I saw CRD had a video a month ago afterwards. His was really good! And yes if you come across any drivers or software for this thing I'd be most appreciative!
I think this was really interesting for the difference between somebody who was kinda present for the era, versus somebody who wasn't born yet and had to work backwards from what they knew
When servicing old stuck plastic gear trains, I first thoroughly clean off the old dried out grease with IPA, then place the tiniest drop of sewing machine oil on any motor or guide spindles and finally apply a small amount of pure silicone lube to the edges of the gears using a small cocktail straw cut at a sharp angle (this creates a nice fine tipped applicator that can scoop up just the right amount of lube).
From a UK perspective, hand-held scanners were a hot peripheral for 8- and 16-bit home computers in the 1980s: you had to draw the scanner over the page or image you wanted to scan. I also remember working for a bank in 1991 and one of my jobs was scanning signatures from mortgage agreements. They had a huge flatbed scanner. It was all set up to scan just the signature panel, so for the operator is was literally press a button, scan, and assign a mortgage number to the resultant black-and-white file.
Isn't that awesome? It's amazing how a tiny thing like that can totally transform the visual appeal of a disguised, bog standard Tandy. I have several 2500s but the Victor just is so much cooler.
@@TechTimeTraveller It's those little things that often excite me. In general so many of them are just beige boxes, and green PCBs but sometimes you see a button like this or the backside of a motherboard that just looks like art and you know that somebody really cared about that when they designed it.
A very interesting device. We had an Amiga 2000 in 1988, and for some reason my father also bought a "scanner" with it. In this case it was a CCTV monochrome video camera attached to a stand over a flat base. There was a little motor that turned a colour wheel. The way it worked was that it would take four pictures, one in b&W , one in red, one in green, and one in blue. After a couple of minutes you'd have a 4096 colour picture of what you scanned on the monitor. For some reason I liked scanning album covers from my record collection, but I had zero actual use for it. Still, happy that my father bought it, because it was a lot of fun.
There were scanners that used your dot matrix printer. The scanner fit on the printer head and then the software controlled the printer heads movement. IIRC it was called "ThunderScan" and came out in 1984
Used one of those at work in the mid 80's. Actually worked very well. I believe it did 5-bit images. It took the place of the print head in an ImageWriter Apple printer.
Scanners and printers always bring back memories, because of how much we depended on them to bridge this "new" digital media with traditional print. My first scanner was a Logitech ScanMan handheld unit, which required its own ISA card. I think my dad got it in 1991 or 92, and around 30 years later I picked up the same model to run in one of my 486s. I still find something especially magical about these devices from the 80s and 90s.
@devikwolf I was so excited when I got my greyscale Scanman lol. I sucked though at aligning the pieces of larger images and keeping scanning movement consistent.
I'm a millenial and not so long ago during my engineering studies when we did hand drawing excercises, most classmates were struggling with keeping the technical drawing tidy and free of smudges... I was just scanning the page every so often and making duplicates to continue drawing on, wasteful perhaps, but it's like you'd make layers in photoshop but irl. And all of this was easy and avaiable to everyone but it seemed like my peers just didn't know... Another thing is you can make crazy high resolution ''photographs'' of flat-ish objects at like 1200 DPI... I was doing this as a ten year old. Then later I figured you could build a large bellows box style camera out of it with the CCD 1d array as a sensor by sweeping it, you get weird effects because the picture is not one snapshot of time but a progression instead. I'ts cool tech! Your video's are the most interesting.
Way back in the Elder Days, I had a thing called Digiview for my Amiga 1000. It hooked up to the printer port and used a B&W TV security camera for input. So resolution was limited and generally suitable for pictures rather than line art or text. It came with an RGB & clear color wheel so you could shoot three color fields and merge them into a full color picture. I build a platform for it that was like that Chinon on steroids. Oddly enough, my avatar over there is a remnant from those days, made from a Digiview pic of me photoshopped onto a Shadow magazine cover. :-)
Ahhh, yes. My first scanner was a Mustek Paragon 600. I worked an entire summer (1994) as an apprentice at Alabama Computer Associates (I was 13 and had been apprenticing since November 1992) to pay for it. It would scan three different passes to get all the colors, and it blew everyone's mind that I could computerize people's pictures. Good luck on rebuilding your high school lab!
The power up explosion bit was awesome! I did love the chunky, grindy sound that scanner makes. I'd rather hear that than the whine the scanner in our current Epson all-in-one machine makes. I end up scanning a lot of things these days as my son has done all his schooling from home since 2020.
My first scanner, was a Migraph hand scanner, which I used in the late 1990s on my Amiga 2000. I still have the scanner, but haven't used it since I bought my first flat bed colour scanner back in 1990. Both scanners, used the SCSI bus, which I happened to have on the Amiga. My MicroTek MRS-600E3, was so special to me, that I carted it home from Calgary, in the cockpit of the DC-10.
That's an interesting story about running the computer lab in High School. Whe I was in University, I was hired as a TA to run my Department's computer lab. I received a full scholarship/tuition waiver in return. This made a huge difference in my finances.
Your channel is pretty awesome. If 1 in 3 videos doesn't perform as well as you'd hope then 3 will under perform in a row every 27 videos. The only thing I can say is this most recent video that got lower views "computer scanning like it's 1989" sounds ambiguous and it took me a while to figure out what you were talking about. A title like "this is how they scanned photos 30 years ago" or something like that might have better. Also the acual scanner should be promimently in the thumbnail because that amazing looking gadget got me interested once i saw it.
Curious Marc (another technical RUclipsr) has a very advanced version of this overhead scanner. It uses a laser to detect curvature of the pages it's scanning and then corrects the perspective so taht they appear flattened in the actual scan. It's very, very expensive. Someone built a scanner for Macintoshes that attached to the print head of an ImageWriter, which gave it a way to "scan" across a document without having to build any actual scanning hardware. I only know it existed.
The Thunderscan. Yeah I saw one for sale and was tempted but it means I have to buy a Silentwriter or such.. and I try not to collect printers as I never use them. Really bizarre device!
Although I’ve never owned one I gotta say I instantly recognized the “look” of the scans. Back in the day I would call companies for schematics or the like (service engineer) and would receive this exactly in the mail. Geez, one of my first jobs in the engineering department was “cleaning” up scans and FAXes for the library. .. 😂
Oh, yeah, the history of how IBM (IIRC) developed the UPC is absolutely fascinating.There were other options going, like NCR's (again, IIRC) "bullseye" code. But the UPC system won out, partly due to space-efficiency and partly because the labels could be made on a typewriter if needed. I went on a big deep-dive into this in 2019&2020, and there's some amazing archive pictures. I love the first products with a barcode, the first computerised checkouts, even the scanner units themselves (they didn't all use a laser-window at first!)
Oh! It's interesting that they did these floating-camera document-scanners with a linear CCD. I always thought linear demanded a flatbed or handheld scanner. You did a fantastic job with the foley here, by the way. I especially love that B-roll with your ear up to the unit, instead of showing the mic. That way the sound was looping, was it really like that? I imagine when the buffer fills-up before it's all written to disk, maybe it waits a little while, giving it that irregular stop-start cadence. On the foley front, I've been collecting mechanical sounds which have musical uses. Would it be alright for me to sample the motor's speeds and (eventually...) use it in a track? (I'm thinking it could be turned into a purr sound, and maybe also some fast percussion?) I also really like that 1-bit photo of your cat. Very atmospheric. I bet it'd be cool as hell colourised! (I'm thinking purple, red, and yellow. But that's just me. Cyan, blue, and purple could also be very interesting.) I usually wait until the end of a video to make a comment, much like this, because I figured repeating comments had diminishing returns in the algorithm. But someone with a much-smaller channel than yours told me they experienced it fairly linearly, so. You also got two little ones spurred-on by asides at the start :)
I bet the scanner head is capable of grayscale, but due to the limited speed of the serial/parallel ports it's internally converting it to monochrome or halftone. Also that doesn't look like a true 300 dpi; it's probably upscaled.
The dithered scans would've been pretty good for simple print flyers and things. Stuff that would've been incredibly popular at the time. Especially around schools, offices, churches, etc. Depending how long ago it is, full color digital publication would've probably been uncommon/expensive.
I still use two ancient scanners on what's nearly daily basis for digitizing my slides and negatives as I shoot and develop them: a Linotype-Hell Saphir Ultra II flatbed and a Nikon Coolscan IV ED. surely nowhere near as ancient as the scanner in the video, but still, at least the linotype is from the 90s ;) due to my analog photography, scanners have become quite the interesting topic for me
Love my coolscan V with the auto slide feeder. Have yet to do the resister mod so you can scan full rolls of film. Edit: Did you watch CRD dude's video on the "elmo", carousel slide machine to various video out connectors.
@@escgoogle3865 huh, have not heard about the resistor mod so far! the auto slide feeder sounds like something I could get a lot use out of. and yes, I did watch the CRD video, what an interesting device!
I'd have loved something like that, but couldn't afford anything at all. Eventually, flatbed scanners got to be cheap enough...a decent photo scanner is not something I can live without--tons of old photos to work on.
Back in the day I drove several hours to test a flat bed scanner before buying. The pillock that had got there before me was in the process of testing it already by scanning a page at 4000dpi. This involved heavy interpolation so was entirely pointless. It also took several hours for an A4 page. Meaning an entirely wasted trip for me due to him completely monopolising the machine for stupid reasons.
Hmm, yeah, even at their stated 240x256 pixel with 4-bit colour depth resolution, you'd still need ~31kB of memory to store the picture... and it says it packs it into display memory! If the ad said it streamed the picture bitstream onto a tape, or something, maybe I could understand. But it doesn't! (3:17)
If you don't currently have one, would you like a Logitech ScanMan? I have a complete-in-box ScanMan Colour for PC with the ISA controller card that's only gathering dust. Great video as usual! I remember a similar overhead scanner in my elementary school library. I asked about it and was told that it didn't work very well, but it wasn't broken.
in the DOS days, Netware was the best network! hands down! :) they ported the drivers to windows when DOS died, which of coarse was the beginning of the end L(
10:45 - Is that floppy eject button the original one? EDIT: It seems to be the original one. That leads me to my next question: Is the floppy drive the original one, or was it perhaps lifted from a machine from a manufacturer targeting a slightly different market?
If you can hear VGA CRT whine, you're either lying or your monitor is about to die. You could have upped the resolution to 1024x768x16 or at least 800x600x16 (x256 should work too) with that 512k Paradise cart.
Those corner markers seem like a very clever idea. Would love to see someone come up with something similar for use with phone scanner apps. Those only tend to work if you want to scan a whole page, and the table isn't white.
Would I buy one of these just to glue coloured filters to the scan head and overlay the resulting scans to get an artsy faux coloured image I could easily achieve in seconds with modern methods? Yes, yes I would.
Scanimate? "Scanimate is an analog computer animation (video synthesizer) system developed from the late 1960s to the 1980s by Computer Image Corporation of Denver, Colorado"
@Clancydaenlightened Where I live most of the public school students have Chromebooks or such allocated to them for the year. But ours is kind of a wealthy area now.
I will. Just trying to find the right stuff so it doesn't damage anything below. But actually the sound you're hearing isn't far off at all from how it originally sounded. It's just got a very loud gearing mechanism.
The vintage/retro computing scene really needs to stop mispronouncing "Wang" (long "a" sound - rhymes with "long", is the correct pronunciation). It's seriously pissing me off and makes us North American's look arrogant and jingoist . . . at best, and I'm so sick of the SAME F#CKIN joke.
One of my Dad's employers had Wang systems and the company's own sales reps and techs pronounced it 'Waang'. It's just an old, lame dad joke, which is the only type I typically do here.
@@TechTimeTraveller it still doesn’t make them right. Have you been to China? Do you have any Chinese friends? I’m guessing no. Source - my wife’s maiden name.
![Eminem - Like My Shit [Official Audio]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/vx_IMvFkrfA/mqdefault.jpg)
Sorry for the long gap between videos. Life has been really busy this summer, especially my day job which has eaten up evenings and weekends. Decided to devote scarce free time to enjoying the pool than sitting in my office while the weather was good. But I did keep several projects moving along so you'll see those start popping up in September! Hope everyone has been having a great summer!
nah its cool man, if you have nice weather enjoy it, plenty of basement time coming soon
@@TechTimeTraveller It's not the audience that's upset with your irregular schedule, it's the Algorithm god and its servants. Take your time and have fun.
Also one of my cats is also aptly named Kitty (in her native language though).
9:30 - I love the little _Miniscribe_ factory in the background with its stacks of bricks outside.
I started high school in 1995 and we had a Logitech (I think) roller hand scanner and would have been using Windows 3.1. I can't for the life of me remember if we could scan directly into Word for Windows. I thought I this comment was going to be more helpful until my brain just gave up. All I can remember is accidentally elongating my photograph and hoping that our (volatile) IT teacher wouldn't notice.
@@Metal_Maxine I had one of those about that time too, I recall you had to use its OCR software, but then again our computer got MS Works, I don't know about full blown office at the time... My dad mainly used it to scan receipts for his business
If your washing machine ever breaks down, you've got a spare motor.
Every time I see a Chinon product all I can think of is that Headon commercial and then giggle to myself going "Chinon, apply directly to the chin!"
Cathode Ray Dude just a few weeks ago did a video on a page scanner from this era and mentioned the lack of videos about scanners online. Hope he sees this one
14:27 I have a backup of *most* of Xdrivers, if you want. I could try and find the driver or just send you a copy.
Also, can I just say how thankful I am that you put good video and audio of the mechanism at work in the video? I love the sounds these things make.
Many thanks! Yes I started filming this 2 months ago but work kept preventing me from getting it done. And then I saw CRD had a video a month ago afterwards. His was really good! And yes if you come across any drivers or software for this thing I'd be most appreciative!
I think this was really interesting for the difference between somebody who was kinda present for the era, versus somebody who wasn't born yet and had to work backwards from what they knew
When servicing old stuck plastic gear trains, I first thoroughly clean off the old dried out grease with IPA, then place the tiniest drop of sewing machine oil on any motor or guide spindles and finally apply a small amount of pure silicone lube to the edges of the gears using a small cocktail straw cut at a sharp angle (this creates a nice fine tipped applicator that can scoop up just the right amount of lube).
From a UK perspective, hand-held scanners were a hot peripheral for 8- and 16-bit home computers in the 1980s: you had to draw the scanner over the page or image you wanted to scan. I also remember working for a bank in 1991 and one of my jobs was scanning signatures from mortgage agreements. They had a huge flatbed scanner. It was all set up to scan just the signature panel, so for the operator is was literally press a button, scan, and assign a mortgage number to the resultant black-and-white file.
I always wondered how useful scanners would be in the era before VGA. I didn't even know the Commodore 64 had one until I researched this video!
That triangular Power Button is the coolest thing I have ever seen.
Isn't that awesome? It's amazing how a tiny thing like that can totally transform the visual appeal of a disguised, bog standard Tandy. I have several 2500s but the Victor just is so much cooler.
@@TechTimeTraveller It's those little things that often excite me. In general so many of them are just beige boxes, and green PCBs but sometimes you see a button like this or the backside of a motherboard that just looks like art and you know that somebody really cared about that when they designed it.
PCX, haven't seen that file extension in a loooooooong time.
A very interesting device. We had an Amiga 2000 in 1988, and for some reason my father also bought a "scanner" with it. In this case it was a CCTV monochrome video camera attached to a stand over a flat base. There was a little motor that turned a colour wheel. The way it worked was that it would take four pictures, one in b&W , one in red, one in green, and one in blue. After a couple of minutes you'd have a 4096 colour picture of what you scanned on the monitor. For some reason I liked scanning album covers from my record collection, but I had zero actual use for it. Still, happy that my father bought it, because it was a lot of fun.
There were scanners that used your dot matrix printer. The scanner fit on the printer head and then the software controlled the printer heads movement. IIRC it was called "ThunderScan" and came out in 1984
We had a collection of A+ magazine's and I would always drool at the thunderscan ad for the apple II and imagewriter
Used one of those at work in the mid 80's. Actually worked very well. I believe it did 5-bit images. It took the place of the print head in an ImageWriter Apple printer.
I actually flinched at that explosion. Thanks m8 -.-
I was like.. no way anyone will actually flinch at this. Too obviously cartoon..
@@TechTimeTraveller It's how I discovered my computer's volume was set far too high
Scanners and printers always bring back memories, because of how much we depended on them to bridge this "new" digital media with traditional print. My first scanner was a Logitech ScanMan handheld unit, which required its own ISA card. I think my dad got it in 1991 or 92, and around 30 years later I picked up the same model to run in one of my 486s. I still find something especially magical about these devices from the 80s and 90s.
@devikwolf I was so excited when I got my greyscale Scanman lol. I sucked though at aligning the pieces of larger images and keeping scanning movement consistent.
I'm a millenial and not so long ago during my engineering studies when we did hand drawing excercises, most classmates were struggling with keeping the technical drawing tidy and free of smudges... I was just scanning the page every so often and making duplicates to continue drawing on, wasteful perhaps, but it's like you'd make layers in photoshop but irl. And all of this was easy and avaiable to everyone but it seemed like my peers just didn't know... Another thing is you can make crazy high resolution ''photographs'' of flat-ish objects at like 1200 DPI... I was doing this as a ten year old. Then later I figured you could build a large bellows box style camera out of it with the CCD 1d array as a sensor by sweeping it, you get weird effects because the picture is not one snapshot of time but a progression instead. I'ts cool tech! Your video's are the most interesting.
I love black and white photography and halftones. This is honestly so cool to me.
Way back in the Elder Days, I had a thing called Digiview for my Amiga 1000. It hooked up to the printer port and used a B&W TV security camera for input. So resolution was limited and generally suitable for pictures rather than line art or text. It came with an RGB & clear color wheel so you could shoot three color fields and merge them into a full color picture. I build a platform for it that was like that Chinon on steroids. Oddly enough, my avatar over there is a remnant from those days, made from a Digiview pic of me photoshopped onto a Shadow magazine cover. :-)
Love that Bill Chiper looking power button on that PC.
Its so cool watching video's of computers and computer equipment from back in the day
Lots of skits in this one 10/10 will watch again.
Thank you!
9:23 The MiniScribe factory with the hard disk bricks!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣
I had this scene done and I was like.. how can I make this just a little more crazy lol
Those two skits made my day.
Bring back triangular shaped power buttons!
Ahhh, yes. My first scanner was a Mustek Paragon 600. I worked an entire summer (1994) as an apprentice at Alabama Computer Associates (I was 13 and had been apprenticing since November 1992) to pay for it. It would scan three different passes to get all the colors, and it blew everyone's mind that I could computerize people's pictures. Good luck on rebuilding your high school lab!
I'm just impressed the scanner hasn't turned yellow :)
It's a little bit yellow, but I guess having spent most of it's life in a box it's dome better than most.
The power up explosion bit was awesome! I did love the chunky, grindy sound that scanner makes. I'd rather hear that than the whine the scanner in our current Epson all-in-one machine makes. I end up scanning a lot of things these days as my son has done all his schooling from home since 2020.
My first scanner, was a Migraph hand scanner, which I used in the late 1990s on my Amiga 2000. I still have the scanner, but haven't used it since I bought my first flat bed colour scanner back in 1990. Both scanners, used the SCSI bus, which I happened to have on the Amiga. My MicroTek MRS-600E3, was so special to me, that I carted it home from Calgary, in the cockpit of the DC-10.
you should def look into how grocery store scanners came around. its so rad
The Hoover scanner was hilarious 😂
That's an interesting story about running the computer lab in High School.
Whe I was in University, I was hired as a TA to run my Department's computer lab. I received a full scholarship/tuition waiver in return. This made a huge difference in my finances.
Your channel is pretty awesome. If 1 in 3 videos doesn't perform as well as you'd hope then 3 will under perform in a row every 27 videos. The only thing I can say is this most recent video that got lower views "computer scanning like it's 1989" sounds ambiguous and it took me a while to figure out what you were talking about. A title like "this is how they scanned photos 30 years ago" or something like that might have better. Also the acual scanner should be promimently in the thumbnail because that amazing looking gadget got me interested once i saw it.
Thank you! I might just try what you suggested anyway. Can't hurt!
You need to find a Thunderscan for the Imagewriter II. It kinda sucked looking back, but it was amazing back then.
Curious Marc (another technical RUclipsr) has a very advanced version of this overhead scanner. It uses a laser to detect curvature of the pages it's scanning and then corrects the perspective so taht they appear flattened in the actual scan. It's very, very expensive.
Someone built a scanner for Macintoshes that attached to the print head of an ImageWriter, which gave it a way to "scan" across a document without having to build any actual scanning hardware. I only know it existed.
The Thunderscan. Yeah I saw one for sale and was tempted but it means I have to buy a Silentwriter or such.. and I try not to collect printers as I never use them. Really bizarre device!
Nice to see the Victor brand appear.
Although I’ve never owned one I gotta say I instantly recognized the “look” of the scans. Back in the day I would call companies for schematics or the like (service engineer) and would receive this exactly in the mail. Geez, one of my first jobs in the engineering department was “cleaning” up scans and FAXes for the library. .. 😂
Now I understand what's is going on with old service manuals for film cameras. Impossible to read any schematics. Now I know why.
Oh, yeah, the history of how IBM (IIRC) developed the UPC is absolutely fascinating.There were other options going, like NCR's (again, IIRC) "bullseye" code. But the UPC system won out, partly due to space-efficiency and partly because the labels could be made on a typewriter if needed.
I went on a big deep-dive into this in 2019&2020, and there's some amazing archive pictures. I love the first products with a barcode, the first computerised checkouts, even the scanner units themselves (they didn't all use a laser-window at first!)
.. I did not know that Chinon were producing scanners. My father had a Chinon reflex camera...
gotta have one of these units Chinon DS-3000s for the mixed traditional-computer animation of the 80s.
thanks for refreshing my old memories too
To be fair, working as primarily a web designer, I scanned almost everything at 150 dpi into the early 2000s for speed and storage reasons.
I still scan most forms at 150. It's all you need typically.
Reminds me of a tiny LINAC (as would be used for radiotherapy.)
It kept reminding me of the therac 25.
Oh! It's interesting that they did these floating-camera document-scanners with a linear CCD. I always thought linear demanded a flatbed or handheld scanner.
You did a fantastic job with the foley here, by the way. I especially love that B-roll with your ear up to the unit, instead of showing the mic. That way the sound was looping, was it really like that? I imagine when the buffer fills-up before it's all written to disk, maybe it waits a little while, giving it that irregular stop-start cadence.
On the foley front, I've been collecting mechanical sounds which have musical uses. Would it be alright for me to sample the motor's speeds and (eventually...) use it in a track? (I'm thinking it could be turned into a purr sound, and maybe also some fast percussion?)
I also really like that 1-bit photo of your cat. Very atmospheric. I bet it'd be cool as hell colourised! (I'm thinking purple, red, and yellow. But that's just me. Cyan, blue, and purple could also be very interesting.)
I usually wait until the end of a video to make a comment, much like this, because I figured repeating comments had diminishing returns in the algorithm. But someone with a much-smaller channel than yours told me they experienced it fairly linearly, so. You also got two little ones spurred-on by asides at the start :)
PTFE lubes are good for plastics and u can apply it using a cotton swab to keep it from dripping.
I have a ComputerEyes for the Commodore 64. Creates a 1 bit scan from composite input. And it's sooo slow. The scanning software is written in BASIC!
I think there was a Handyscan or something like that for the c64 as well?
@@TechTimeTraveller there's some interface board for the user port to use some generic hand scanner originally made for pc, handyscanner 64.
I bet the scanner head is capable of grayscale, but due to the limited speed of the serial/parallel ports it's internally converting it to monochrome or halftone. Also that doesn't look like a true 300 dpi; it's probably upscaled.
Oh dear, it sounds like a cement mixer! haha.
When was TWAIN invented?
Best wishes.
That scanner has an epic sound.
🤣🤣🤣
When I was a kid, people used to say "xerox it" when referring to making a copy of a document.
Yep. Are you old enough to remember when people 'dittoed' things?
No, but I do use the term "Ditto" when I agree with someone exactly.
The dithered scans would've been pretty good for simple print flyers and things. Stuff that would've been incredibly popular at the time. Especially around schools, offices, churches, etc. Depending how long ago it is, full color digital publication would've probably been uncommon/expensive.
A still very cool object
I still use two ancient scanners on what's nearly daily basis for digitizing my slides and negatives as I shoot and develop them: a Linotype-Hell Saphir Ultra II flatbed and a Nikon Coolscan IV ED. surely nowhere near as ancient as the scanner in the video, but still, at least the linotype is from the 90s ;)
due to my analog photography, scanners have become quite the interesting topic for me
Love my coolscan V with the auto slide feeder. Have yet to do the resister mod so you can scan full rolls of film.
Edit: Did you watch CRD dude's video on the "elmo", carousel slide machine to various video out connectors.
@@escgoogle3865 huh, have not heard about the resistor mod so far! the auto slide feeder sounds like something I could get a lot use out of. and yes, I did watch the CRD video, what an interesting device!
Not sure if they have invaded Canada yet but our Circle K convenience stores have a similar scanning system used in their self check out machines
I'd have loved something like that, but couldn't afford anything at all. Eventually, flatbed scanners got to be cheap enough...a decent photo scanner is not something I can live without--tons of old photos to work on.
Back in the day I drove several hours to test a flat bed scanner before buying.
The pillock that had got there before me was in the process of testing it already by scanning a page at 4000dpi. This involved heavy interpolation so was entirely pointless. It also took several hours for an A4 page. Meaning an entirely wasted trip for me due to him completely monopolising the machine for stupid reasons.
Hmm, yeah, even at their stated 240x256 pixel with 4-bit colour depth resolution, you'd still need ~31kB of memory to store the picture... and it says it packs it into display memory! If the ad said it streamed the picture bitstream onto a tape, or something, maybe I could understand. But it doesn't! (3:17)
ooo that pyramid dollar bill joke -- i may be tired, but i caught it, nice
If you don't currently have one, would you like a Logitech ScanMan? I have a complete-in-box ScanMan Colour for PC with the ISA controller card that's only gathering dust.
Great video as usual! I remember a similar overhead scanner in my elementary school library. I asked about it and was told that it didn't work very well, but it wasn't broken.
I'd love that. I have a Colour but it's missing the interface card. Would love to gather a bunch of old scanners and try them out!
@@TechTimeTraveller I'll dig it out today and get in touch by e-mail. 🙂
in the DOS days, Netware was the best network! hands down! :) they ported the drivers to windows when DOS died, which of coarse was the beginning of the end L(
10:45 - Is that floppy eject button the original one?
EDIT: It seems to be the original one. That leads me to my next question: Is the floppy drive the original one, or was it perhaps lifted from a machine from a manufacturer targeting a slightly different market?
If you can hear VGA CRT whine, you're either lying or your monitor is about to die.
You could have upped the resolution to 1024x768x16 or at least 800x600x16 (x256 should work too) with that 512k Paradise cart.
3:09 - it says right there that they were using 30kb images. So, they did it by having a terrible copy, which I bet you could save to tape.
Those corner markers seem like a very clever idea. Would love to see someone come up with something similar for use with phone scanner apps. Those only tend to work if you want to scan a whole page, and the table isn't white.
It sounds like a diesel truck with valve problems 😅
Scanning literally grinds its gears!
/me also being from Ontario wonders... did you ever login to my BBS "Cannibal Bar & Grill" located in Mississauga?
Probably not.. Mississauga was long distance from the Aurora area I was in.
Would I buy one of these just to glue coloured filters to the scan head and overlay the resulting scans to get an artsy faux coloured image I could easily achieve in seconds with modern methods? Yes, yes I would.
Scanimate? "Scanimate is an analog computer animation (video synthesizer) system developed from the late 1960s to the 1980s by Computer Image Corporation of Denver, Colorado"
Why E.T.'s albino cousin censored?
UCC?
Pickering.
0:45 go to public school
Not everyone gonna have a laptop
Maybe a smartphone
@Clancydaenlightened Where I live most of the public school students have Chromebooks or such allocated to them for the year. But ours is kind of a wealthy area now.
Hate to be "that guy" but it's not CHEYE-non, it's chee-NON. The company is of Japanese origin.
probably shouldn't have a high res photo of your keys
Every key in the shot is there just as a memento. The locks they went to have long since been changed.
Oh no! Keys to a computer lab that was there in the 80s, lol.
Man, give that poor thing a bit (just a little bit) of grease on it's gears. It sounds awful.
I will. Just trying to find the right stuff so it doesn't damage anything below. But actually the sound you're hearing isn't far off at all from how it originally sounded. It's just got a very loud gearing mechanism.
That's terrible. LOL.
The vintage/retro computing scene really needs to stop mispronouncing "Wang" (long "a" sound - rhymes with "long", is the correct pronunciation). It's seriously pissing me off and makes us North American's look arrogant and jingoist . . . at best, and I'm so sick of the SAME F#CKIN joke.
One of my Dad's employers had Wang systems and the company's own sales reps and techs pronounced it 'Waang'. It's just an old, lame dad joke, which is the only type I typically do here.
@@TechTimeTraveller it still doesn’t make them right. Have you been to China? Do you have any Chinese friends? I’m guessing no. Source - my wife’s maiden name.
@gravis @cathoderaydude @crd