What was the first computer scanner marketed for personal use?

[Unknown_K]

I think my SCSI UMAX 1200 was from the late 90's as well, still works last time I used it (on a 68040 Mac Quadra 950 I think it was).

No idea what the life of the bulbs on those old scanners is.

 

[Chuck(G)]

I've never checked, but I recall the first flatbed scanner I used had an ordinary fluorescent lamp in it. Of course, that was monochrome; I suspect that the same lamp in a color scanner would really be inappropriate.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Looking back, I just realised that this 1980 S-100 bus image capture system is, from a hardware point of view, pretty much exactly the same as my current book scanner: a camera and a frame buffer. Only mine has about two million times as much memory for the frame buffer (and of course the hardware to which the image is transferred for processing has many, many times more than that).

It is funny how so much of the “quality improvement” in computer-related tech over the years isn’t really because of new inventions or techniques, but just the natural result of “quantity improvement”. If you dig around you can find endless examples where an implementation of (thing X) was invented back in the 1950s or 60s that essentially worked the same way as the modern version, but their version looks laughably crude because it had to be done with access to just a couple K of slow RAM and a CPU with performance measured in thousands of instructions per second instead of billions.

Sorta nuts just how much of what we do today depends almost solely on fifty years of innovation in IC manufacturing. There’s nothing else like it. The fastest airplanes being built today are no faster than ones built in the 1950’s, and if you want to go to the moon you’re going to need a rocket just as big as the one Neil Armstrong sat on top of, but computers today… it’s like standing up a bottle rocket next to a Saturn V and observing that the bottle rocket has *higher* rated lift capacity. Crazy, really.