{"id":61,"date":"2012-05-29T12:43:43","date_gmt":"2012-05-29T17:43:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/compmuseum.org\/blog\/?p=61"},"modified":"2012-05-29T12:43:43","modified_gmt":"2012-05-29T17:43:43","slug":"how-we-used-a-16-year-old-scanner-to-bring-you-30-year-old-ads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/compmuseum.org\/blog\/how-we-used-a-16-year-old-scanner-to-bring-you-30-year-old-ads\/","title":{"rendered":"How we used a 16-year-old scanner to bring you 30-year-old ads"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Lifting the lid on a UMAX scanner that has stood the test of time<\/p><\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

This weekend, when we wanted to digitize some magazine advertisements for computer systems from the ’70s<\/a>, 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.)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Ah, but I’m forgetting the most important thing! The cool old ads<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em> 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Borge for Verbatim, from BYTE magazine, November 1979<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"

The DYNABYTE DB8\/2 microcomputer, from BYTE magazine, March 1979<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/compmuseum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/compmuseum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/compmuseum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/compmuseum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/compmuseum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/compmuseum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70,"href":"https:\/\/compmuseum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions\/70"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/compmuseum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/compmuseum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/compmuseum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}