A Long And Incomplete History of Scanners

Obligatory "I'm glad you're experimenting with short-form content" comment

Don't worry, 100 minutes is a perfect size for a video. They shouldn't even make videos smaller than that!

"Gray scanner for computer," needs to be a t-shirt, and is going to be what I now call all old peripherals.

"No one wants to go back to the past: My brain: "He's gonna take you back to the past, to play with scanners that all suck ass..."

23:00 "Inside your computer, there are two wolves"

A history of scanners? A technology that has never once interested me or ever made me wonder exactly how they work? But, CRD is explaining it to me in a hour forty minute video? Hell yeah BROTHER!!!! Count me in.

I love seeing words like "Quiet" and "Silent" on old dot matrix printers. In my experience (albeit from ancient childhood memories of the early-mid 90s), "Quiet" meant "you can technically operate this machine without ear plugs and not suffer permanent hearing damage".

Spending half an hour troubleshooting just to find out there's no disk space is literally my proxmox journey.

10:55 - The fun part of ISA is that until it became standardized as "ISA", it ran at the CPU speed. That means an original IBM PC ran it at 4.77 MHz, and the actual throughput was under 1 MB/s; while some early AT/286 clones might run it at 12 MHz. That accounts for the transfer speed differences. It wasn't until clone makers decided to actually standardize it that it settled on a fixed bus speed that accounted for the 8 MB/s transfer speed (on the 16-bit bus at 8.33 MHz.) Note that IBM never standardized it while it was the primary bus. AT ran it at CPU speed, as did the ISA 8088 and 286 PS/2 models. Only after they abandoned Microchannel in the Pentium era did they adopt the clone-made-standard fixed 8 MHz bus. (And really, by the post-PS/2 era, all PCs were just clones, even when they were from IBM.)

A 1h40m cathode ray dude video?! We’re in for a real treat ❤

I'm watching this while operating a scanner that costs 60k$+ and takes 2.4 gigapixel images. So I'm questioning how intrinsically boring they are! :)

Haven’t made it all the way through but the most interesting thing about scanners is the protocol name. TWAIN = Technology Without an Interesting Name

Scanners didn't change my life. TWAIN drivers changed my life ... FOR WORSE. VUESCAN actually changed my life. This little software packed ALL the scanners - all the 20 or 40 THOUSAND models of them - into a single driver that TRAMPLES over windows signed drivers, installs them anyway, and lets you use features that you didn't know you have, but it knows all the 6 models of CCD that the majority of table scanners had, and talks to them directly. I had a Canon usb-only scanner, no power cable. VUESCAN knew it could scan 2 independent photographs at once. Canon never shipped that feature on my scanner! But the CCD was there! Whoever did that program was PISSED, and I love him for it, all the 49.95 it cost was WORTH IT. And it ran your stuff on any windows, 10 inclusive.

Hey Gravis! I'm a digital press tech in the production level space and you should know that halftoning is absolutely still a thing! In fact, the interface boards for the machines I work on that connect to the Raster Image Processor (RIP) workstation are literally called Halftone Boards. Digital presses are essentially giant laser/inkjet printers and primarily still use halftone techniques when creating images. Pretty easy to see if you take a modern print and put it under an eye loupe. One of the neat things though is halftone technique involves choosing the right screen for your print that changes things like dot shape, screen angle, dot size, etc to prevent print defects. One of the things digital presses can do is just select the properties of the "screens" at time of print on the RIP. There's honestly some really cool stuff once you get to production/commercial level printing!

In my last year of high school (93), our art department got its first scanner. Color, fortunately. The art teacher wanted to show our class and demo it near the end of a class, and I (being the computer nerd of the class) was allowed to actually test it in front of everyone using graphics software. While I was pretty good with computers, graphics in this kind of context was pretty new to me, and I (from a gamer perspective; and entering into the extreme 90s), set the scan resolution and color depth to the absolute max. This was substantially higher than the resolution of the monitor, it would have taken ten screens to show it all at once. Ten minutes later it had a one centimetre wide bar processed and visible on the screen as it filled it in from the top down. It probably would have taken a day to finish, assuming it didn't eventually cause an error. And the class ended. This is actually one of those anxiety based core memories that pops in my head at least once a month. When I did tech for HP scanners and printers, it was omnipresent. I'd actually forgotten it until the first day in training where we handled scanners. Maybe I can retroactively file a workman's comp claim for the trauma and anxiety. :) Fifteen years may be outside the statute of limitations. This memory is currently both a source of anxiety and also mirth.

I remember in the 90s scanning my face directly because I didn't want to take a picture, get it developed, then scan the photo

From an interview with Eugene Gordon: "I led the group that developed the CCD. We understood its importance for color cameras and understood its importance for facsimile machines. I asked Hugh Watson to make the first fax machine that utilized a CCD device. It was a flatbed scanner very similar to devices seen today. I tried to convince AT&T to get into the fax machine business, but they wouldn’t do it. " Watson's patent US3867569 was filed in 1974, so it predated Kurzweil's reading machine.

37:30 You just unlocked a core memory for me. In school in the late 90s, I had a report with lots of images and charts in it, and I had to break the document up into two parts, and edit them on a floppy one part of the document at at time. We weren't allowed to copy files from the disk to the HDD on the shared computers, so the first time I saw all the pages of my final report assembled together at once was when I printed the final copy of it, one half at a time from floppy. I also distinctly remember splitting up MP2 and MP3 files onto multiple floppy sized archives so I can move them from one computer to another, by way of winzip multipart zip files. The worst experience of this I ever had to deal with was zipping up an AVI file into a multi part archive so I could transfer it to another computer. The 100 MB Zip Drive could hold about 90 MB of data, and I had to make 4 trips across campus to move the pieces one chunk at a time, because I had only 1 zip disk. My goodness those were the dark ages of computing compared to today.

1:33:38 missed opportunity to say “but I took a second pass”

Fun fact: the Leica Monochrom is a consumer camera with a monochrome CCD sensor. Also, it made me so happy that you mentioned Foveon sensors.