Comment by mrweasel
17 days ago
Old scanners were SCSI, which made me wonder if you could use them as boot devices, if you could stuff the scanner driver and OCR software into the BIOS. Might be easier now that we have uEFI.
17 days ago
Old scanners were SCSI, which made me wonder if you could use them as boot devices, if you could stuff the scanner driver and OCR software into the BIOS. Might be easier now that we have uEFI.
That is ridiculously fantastic idea!
Shame I used to have an SCSI scanner but I already disassembled it for parts.
One can write a simple bootloader, which reads bytes printed on a paper sheet to memory then boots it. Something like: black (0), white (1) or long rectangle (1), short rectangle (0). Wonder about the storage capacity of the A4 paper.
Use some finer pitch graph paper and people could author "boot sector code" by literally coloring in the little squares with the necessary bits!
Would be sort of like paper tape.
Pepperidge Farm remembers when high-school computing classes used Scantron-style optical mark cards...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HP_Educational_Basic...
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Forth it up on a middle aged PowerPC Mac!
This one boots from the parallel port: https://github.com/climatex/BootLPT (more details here https://boginjr.com/it/sw/dev/bootlpt-86/)
Not all old scanners were just SCSI; there parallel port and proprietary adapter card scanners too.
Some cameras and printers also had SCSI interfaces: Opex MPS-40 mail sorting camera and NeXT Color Ink Jet SCSI.
And don't forget SCSI network adapters (NICs).
I'm wondering if there were a SCSI mouse and/or a SCSI to RS-232 adapter.
Even older scanners were raw ISA piped over a centronix cable
Someone needs to give this a go!
Fantastic IDEA seconded!
OCR? Just have it read out binary. Then it can boot by looking at a punchcard.... or a lot of them.
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Thanks, I've taken the liberty of fixing the typo. (GP used to say "old scanners where SCSI")