email was Mac something something

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Fri Jan 14 07:18:34 2005

At 07:35 PM 1/13/2005, Tom Jennings wrote:
>So... what's the chance of doing this with a solid-state laser?
>Say 9 of them? The idea of high-speed papertape (sic) thrills me.
>I know I'm sick, but I don't want to stop.

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
Received on Fri Jan 14 2005 - 07:18:34 GMT