The 10MB Hard Drive and the Scanner Software

I live in a technology area versus an industrial or rural one.  I was surrounded by parents who worked in the technology field and I got to see some things in their infancy, just because I was around, that was pretty remarkable.

I had a friend named Marsh, who's father worked at home developing software when I was young.  People didn't commonly work at home back then, but what he was doing was something he could do alone, for long stretches of the day. 

I remember seeing my first CD ever at their house.  It was an audio CD and my friend said it didn't scratch like a record did.  He had fun playing with it like it was a Frisbee and doing all sorts of crazy things with it until he finally did enough damage that it wouldn't play anymore.

His father had something none of us had ever seen before: he had a hard drive.  We had different types of floppy drives, the 5.25" and the 3.5" disk-types, but this was a drive that was permanent in your computer and could store vastly more information than a floppy disk.   It was huge back then, it was ten megabytes.   And by huge, I mean physically huge as well.  It rivaled a brick in weight and dimensions.  But it was the coolest of the cool too.

There were papers all over the floor in his father's office.  They were printed out on a dot matrix printer and they looked like large splashes of random characters.  I asked him one day what they were.  He told me they were representations of a single letter or number as a camera viewed it on a piece of paper. 

What my friend's father was trying to do was write one of the first scanner software programs.  Think about the complexity of it.  There is a tiny little "1" on the page that a camera captures.  It's fiber-stained ink that our brains immediately know represent a one.  We know that across fonts and sizes and even handwriting.  But how do you determine if it's a one versus a seven?  And even worse, how do you know it's a "1" and not a lower-case letter L?  Tricky.

It was high-tech back then and it's still a challenge today to scan in something and be able to intelligently convert into editable text.  It was exciting to think about the future of this thing he was calling a "scanner" back then.

The Big Boy Update:  Obsessed with red.  He liked red, now he insists on red.  Do NOT give his sister the red cup or there will be problems.  (And yes, we're working on that.)   But he does love his red.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  "My hands!"  She hates to have her hands dirty.  Well, that might not be true, I think she just likes to clean her hands and wipe her hands.  If you let her wash her hands and give her the foam soap, she will happily stand at the sink and wash and wash and wash for, well, we've never seen her be done before one of us steps in and tries to have the, "water is a precious resource we need to conserve," speech.  Even then, she's not sure she's properly done.