If you ask someone who grew up in the late 1970s or early 1980s what taught them a lot about programming, they’d probably tell you that typing in programs from magazines was very instructive. However, it was also very boring and error-prone. In fact, we’d say it was less instructional to do the typing than it was to do the debugging required to find all your mistakes. Magazines hated that and, as [Tech Tangents] shows us in a recent video, there were efforts to make devices that could scan barcodes from magazines or books to save readers from typing in the latest Star Trek game or Tiny Basic compiler.
The Cauzin Softstrip was a simple scanner that could read barcodes from a magazine or your printer if you wanted to do backups. As [Tech Tangents] points out, you may not have heard of it, but at the time, it seemed to be the future of software distribution.
