Ian Farquhar writes:

...

Around the mid 1980's a rather interesting device appeared. It was essentially an automated scanner for high-density barcodes.

A recent mini-article in "WiReD" mentions a barcode-like encoding mechanism being promoted by (I think) Xerox. It's apparently denser than barcode and it survives copying well.

The Xerox technology is essentially a series of tiny slashes and backslashes. The slashes stand for a 1 and the backslashes a 0 - or vice-versa. This gives you a binary data stream that you can work with. From what I understand, without looking at them closely, the area with these slashes looks like a gray screen. When I first read about this technology a couple of months ago, it was given as a way that sufficiently smart color copiers could restore original color to a black and white copy. Of course there are all kinds of other applications.... ------------------------------------------------------------------ Dan Oelke Alcatel Network Systems droelke@aud.alcatel.com Richardson, TX http://spirit.aud.alcatel.com:8081/~droelke/