Re: ITAR and Paper ROM

At 09:26 AM 2/5/97 -0800, Steve Schear wrote:
>I'm not sure if what I did in the 80s, trying to create what I called
>'paper ROM, is applicable. [....]
>to replace diskettes for inexpensive mass data distribution.  
> Although a technical success, I abandoned the effort
>when I discovered someone had patented (4,488,679) something similar a 
>few years earlier.

Yeah, our patent office is so helpful - granting a patent for
	"Storage of Information By Making Marks On Paper" :-)
You'd think they'd recognize a few thousand years of prior art.....

Xerox also has a similar patent; their method uses little diagonals
to encode data in. ///\\\///  It really _isn't_ called "cuneform".

More practically, sort of, there was the Cauzin Softstrip Reader,
which cost about $200 and held enough data to distribute programs
back when computers and programs were much smaller; a few PC magazines
tried distributing programs by printing them in the back that way.
Cute, but not cute enough to stick around very long.


#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
#     (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)

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In list.cypherpunks, stewarts@ix.netcom.com writes:

> More practically, sort of, there was the Cauzin Softstrip Reader,
> which cost about $200 and held enough data to distribute programs
> back when computers and programs were much smaller; a few PC magazines
> tried distributing programs by printing them in the back that way.
> Cute, but not cute enough to stick around very long.

Cauzin was bought by Eastman Kodak shortly after they started
advertising in the big rags (like _Byte_, which printed a test strip a
month or so before Cauzin made their big advertising push).  Cauzin was
even putting freeware programs in their ads.  At that time, Kodak was
just entering the soon-to-be-lucrative magnetic media market with their
floppy disk line.  I'd say they were bought and buried.
- -- 
           Roy M. Silvernail     [ ]     roy@scytale.com
DNRC Minister Plenipotentiary of All Things Confusing, Software Division
PGP Public Key fingerprint =  31 86 EC B9 DB 76 A7 54  13 0B 6A 6B CC 09 18 B6
      Key available from pubkey@scytale.com, which works now

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