Re: ITAR and Paper ROM
At 09:26 AM 2/5/97 -0800, Steve Schear wrote:
I'm not sure if what I did in the 80s, trying to create what I called 'paper ROM, is applicable. [....] to replace diskettes for inexpensive mass data distribution. Although a technical success, I abandoned the effort when I discovered someone had patented (4,488,679) something similar a few years earlier.
Yeah, our patent office is so helpful - granting a patent for "Storage of Information By Making Marks On Paper" :-) You'd think they'd recognize a few thousand years of prior art..... Xerox also has a similar patent; their method uses little diagonals to encode data in. ///\\\/// It really _isn't_ called "cuneform". More practically, sort of, there was the Cauzin Softstrip Reader, which cost about $200 and held enough data to distribute programs back when computers and programs were much smaller; a few PC magazines tried distributing programs by printing them in the back that way. Cute, but not cute enough to stick around very long. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In list.cypherpunks, stewarts@ix.netcom.com writes:
More practically, sort of, there was the Cauzin Softstrip Reader, which cost about $200 and held enough data to distribute programs back when computers and programs were much smaller; a few PC magazines tried distributing programs by printing them in the back that way. Cute, but not cute enough to stick around very long.
Cauzin was bought by Eastman Kodak shortly after they started advertising in the big rags (like _Byte_, which printed a test strip a month or so before Cauzin made their big advertising push). Cauzin was even putting freeware programs in their ads. At that time, Kodak was just entering the soon-to-be-lucrative magnetic media market with their floppy disk line. I'd say they were bought and buried. - -- Roy M. Silvernail [ ] roy@scytale.com DNRC Minister Plenipotentiary of All Things Confusing, Software Division PGP Public Key fingerprint = 31 86 EC B9 DB 76 A7 54 13 0B 6A 6B CC 09 18 B6 Key available from pubkey@scytale.com, which works now -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMvpwFxvikii9febJAQHI3wP9HrDosf/DQIkbNaJADxqGOaE4fskX3HEP nznkhaMb4WXbCQUg+BNtyh/u15n6M2eA259uHExm1S+//8VENcGC0hmINdsehBJX LcehDOQMpbbj/lSdd/rC0raj7U38wuXZn84xi/bdbXWKwXzVKWaq3AwqRgLm9aBT 9NS0RZOiPEY= =PFiP -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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