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Re: business card CDs, how to get your very own

From:
Date: Sat, 24 Oct 1998 00:58:47 -0500 (CDT)

On Fri, 23 Oct 1998, Michael Sharp wrote:

> OK, I dont claim to be the CD guru here, but I do know that CD's, unlike
> LP's (remember those?) start with the inner most track, and work out. LP's
> have a spiral track, while CD's, from what I know have a bunch of "rings"
> for tracks. BTW, the specs for the CD-card say it holds 18M of data.
> Impressive. Too bad you couldnt encode the data down the length of the card
> and have a special scanner read it. On a standard business card, you would
> have a little morethat 18M to deal with, probably closer to 350M at least.

I remember seeing an encoding scheme that was being proposed by some
organization (on Beyond 2000, on the Discover Channel) that used slanted
lines. The lines were slanted to the right or left to represent 1's and 0's.
The back of a business card could be covered with these lines, and I think
they said a density of 2kb or better could be achieved with standard
printing. The card could be scanned or photographed with a digital camera,
and the right software could pick out the data from the image. This
technique could also be used with faxes, to send data and programs from/to a
regular fax machine.
I doubt anyone is doing much with this, and I don't have any more info on
it, but it could be interesting in the context of wearables. Imagine being
able to look at a page, and retrieve the data from it...

Paul Archer

----------------------------------------------------
A key to the understanding of all religion is that
a god's idea of amusement is Snakes And Ladders with
greased rungs.   -- Terry Pratchett, "Wyrd Sisters"
----------------------------------------------------

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