5 Oct
2004
5 Oct
'04
6:16 a.m.
>>>> "Vintage" == Vintage
Computer Festival <vcf(a)siconic.com> writes:
Vintage> On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, Fred N. van Kempen wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, Ron Hudson wrote:
>
> > I once was wondering if a backup software could be written that
> writes > to laser printer.
> >
> > Backups would be read in with a scanner..
> >
> > Hmm limit usable area to 8"x10" = 80 sq in. 600 dpi = 48mb per
> page. > One way to strike a blow against the paperless office.
>
> I actually have a customer who does something like that!!!
>
> They do a "paper dump" of some critical (to them) inventory stats
> each evening, and those printouts (which are standard A4 forms)
> contain only machine-readable info consisting of barcodes and
> something that looks like, indeed, papertape "strings"
>
> They have a scanner thing that can read those forms. I believe
> every day, the forms from the previous day get sent to HQ, by
> regular mail ;)
Something related: the EFF and PGP teams used paper to export software
that was otherwise (possibly) subject to export restrictions. There's
a nicely crafted standard way to bootstrap the OCR process, and ways
to capture spaces accurately, handle checksums, etc. There's a good
description in the book "Cracking DES" (which is very much worth
reading for other reasons).
paul