Re: Cauzin Softstrip Reader

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

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.
>
> 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.

It was a classic chicken/egg situation.

It didn't make sense to buy one (they weren't cheap) until there
were *lots* of interesting free programs printed in magazines.

And it didn't make sense to waste a lot of magazine pages on programs
until there were *lots* of people with readers.

What was missing was someone to "prime the pump" by, for example,
subsidizing a popular magazine printing *all* their programs in
Cauzin format for at least a year, after which they would either
have sold enough readers to justify the magazine's continuing to
print them, or they would have failed to sell enough, and they
would just fade away.

As it happened, the pump was not meaningfully primed and they faded
away in only a few months.

-michael

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