Old scanners where 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.

▲

ddingus 35 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Someone needs to give this a go!

Fantastic IDEA seconded!

▲

yesturi 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	ddingus 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

▲

estimator7292 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Even older scanners were raw ISA piped over a centronix cable

▲

bobmcnamara 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Forth it up on a middle aged PowerPC Mac!

▲

hackomorespacko 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

*were