email was Mac something something

At 07:35 PM 1/13/2005, Tom Jennings wrote: Why stop at nine? Optical scanning of a tape via linear CCD or video chip or reflected laser must be scads faster than mechanical methods (from pins in holes, to helical scan mag tape). But why limit yourself to perpendicular rows? Sounds like what you want is a dense 2D barcode, like the UPS and USPS codes, but somehow sequential, flowing, 2 1/2 D. The hard part is picking the medium, I'd think. You want something that'll do a fast detectable change that'll keep over time, burnable by a power-enough laser. They speak of mylar tape, but my TTY stuff is so old I've never seen it. Will it detectably deform if you heat it? I've loved brainstorming about these sorts of barcoding schemes. It seems to me that it's a big missing hole in the convergence that everyone's always talking about. There's few super-easy ways to move a URL from print automagically into a computer, and RFID seems almost clunky compared to burning microscopic bar codes all over the surface of objects. - John