Lifting the lid on a UMAX scanner that has stood the test of time

Write this post on a 16-year-old computer? Likely to be an exercise in frustration. In comparison, scanner technology seems to have aged well. In fact, I would argue that today’s scanners, crammed into multifuction devices as an afterthought, are inferior to the top-of-the-line technology of yesteryear.

This weekend, when we wanted to digitize some magazine advertisements for computer systems from the ’70s, we brought a UMAX-brand flatbed scanner from 1996 out of the closet and pressed it into service. The SCSI interface delivered fast performance and 300-dpi scans in minutes on a Macintosh running System 9. (The resolution of the scanner can go much higher, but it wasn’t worth the wait.)

A much more modern Brother multifunction (print, copy, fax, scan) device running over USB on a OS X Macintosh proved to slow, balky and error-prone in comparison. Worse yet, it didn’t scan full 8.5×11 pages — the width it could image came up a full half-inch short.

Ah, but I’m forgetting the most important thing! The cool old ads. Here’s a preview, one well-known personality and a name brand, and one mystery microcomputer from “Dynabyte.” You can see the whole lot on our main site.

Borge for Verbatim, from BYTE magazine, November 1979

The DYNABYTE DB8/2 microcomputer, from BYTE magazine, March 1979

There’s a video posted to YouTube that shows off the way-ahead-of-its-time Xerox Star workstation (officially the 8010 Information System). An uncredited speaker introduces the clip (a quick Google search tells me it’s likely part of a Stanford class on computer-human interaction— that you can take online, for free!)

“In 1981 Xerox introduced the Star office information system. The radical user interface of Star had a major impact on the office system and personal computer industry. Star introduced the use of icons to represent objects and applications, the desktop metaphor with a direct manipulation interface, windows containing multimedia documents, property and option sheets, and generic commands. In some ways, such as its use of the move, copy, and delete functions, Star remains unsurpassed in the consistancy of its interface. Other features such as multimedia, multi-lingual documents have only recently appeared in other systems.

The following video tape was made in 1982 by two Star designers: David Canfield Smith and Charles Irby. It illustrates some of the innovations in computer-human interfaces embodied in the Xerox Star.”

Part two is available on YouTube.