Re: Cauzin Softstrip Reader

[Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca>]

On Thu, 3 Jun 2010, William Heckel wrote:

> I bought one of these back in my //e days.  I think they teamed up with with 
> either Nibble or InCider.
> One or both of the magazines used to print the strips in the back in the 
> magazine.
It seemed to come at a transition time.

I can't remember the time it was introduced, but it was late enough that
a new crowd was coming to the computer magazines, and they didn't want to
type in the programs.  I suspect also the programs were getting larger, 
and the magazines didn't want to use the space for the listings, though I
can't remember how well the Cauzin strips worked at saving space for
listings.

Before that, Byte had played with barcodes for programs, they ran a bunch
of articles about reading barcodes and building your own reader, but they
rare if never used the barcodes to print listings in the magazine.  They
did issue a few "books" that weren't much more than pages of barcodes, you
were in effect buying an assembler or something else, and the barcodes
were the means of distribution.  That time frame, circa 1977, straddled
the period when papertape was either still in use, or at least in 
everyone's memories, but the cassettes were also rising as the 
distribution method.

By the time of the Causin strips, cassettes were pretty standard, and 
floppy disks were making inroads, limited of course by the cost.

Byte did run some program listings via Cauzin strips, but I can't remember 
if it was much more than trying it out.  It got a lot of attention at the 
time, I'm assuming because Cauzin wanted to sell the hardware, but it 
disappeared fairly fast.

It seems like program listings disappeared from Byte not long after, you'd
have to get them online (BBS), which leaves a bunch of articles in the 
magazine without program listings.  And then in retrospect, it wasn't that
much longer before Byte stopped running articles that required program
listings, the shift to merely users having been finished.

   Michael

> The system was supposed to make it easier to get the programs into your Apple 
> rather than typing all the lines of code for all the programs.
> You would just scan the strips and the software converted the strips and zap, 
> you programs was in memory and just save it to disk.
>
> You could print your own strips and share your programs with friends.
>
> It worked quite well for me when I scanned the strips, but when it came to 
> printing the strips, I could never get my reader to read the strips.
> Problems with the quality of the image of the printed strips.
> I had an Epson Spectrum LX80 dot matrix printer, printing the strips really 
> ate up ribbons.
>
> It was a nice idea, just never really caught on.