Maybe, though first thought from a 2009 perspective,
10MB does sound
somewhat small to split in half, but I suppose its no worse than a 5MB
Profile and a lot better than a pair of Twiggy drives.
As with anything else, the
answer is "depends on what you want to do
with it." 5MB is plenty for 7/7 and a few documents. But you won't be
able to also fit Lisa Pascal Workshop.
Did you write the bar code driver yourself? Was it for MacOS or Lisa
Office System?
Thinking about it, I'm fairly sure it was in MacOS by the time Lisas
were cheap enough for my brother's budget. Getting at a one bit input
from MacOS was easier too. I think I had it generate an interrupt
every time there was a change from black to white or vice-versa and
used the system clock to measure the time, and hence the distance
assuming a reasonably constant acceleration. It used the guard bars at
each end to find the start and end speeds and assumed constant
acceleration in between. The decoding algorithm was based on the Apple
][ code which came with the reader, which I disassembled and re-coded,
probably in 68k assembler, but maybe Pascal. The Apple ][ code just
polled the games port and you had to call it when you expected a bar
code to be read. The MacOS version just processed interrupts whenever
they occurred and when it found a valid 8 or 13 digit EANA code or a
local 6 digit item number of the locally printed labels, it told the
host application. I think it generated key events including a carriage
return so the app thought the user had typed a bar code in, which they
could do by hand if necessary.
Very cool. I asked because I wrote some code about 15 years ago to
print and scan in barcodes.
The application was to track incoming shipments, when a truck arrived.
We'd scan in the inventory sheet with a high speed scanner (I think
either the library or the scanner was called Kofax or something like
that), then my app would assign a barcode ID and print a 2nd copy of the
sheet with the barcode on top which was attached to the shipment. Then
at every step the bar code was used to track it and people signed it or
had someone with a barcode reader scan it in at every step the shipment
was seen and had all the items inspected.
At the end, once signed and all that, the barcoded page was rescanned
in, and all the places and times the document showed up on as well as
the first and last scan were stored. So that way if something "fell off
the truck", it could be tracked to the last known scan.
It was fairly easy to generate the bar codes and print'em out as HP PCL,
but much harder to recognize them. I pulled a bunch of tricks and
eventually got it to work well enough to be useful.
I remember using Code 3 of 9, and having worked it on nothing else but
this thing for several weeks, I could read the numeric symbols +
start/end just by eye. (I've forgotten them since.) :-)