Live data from Hacker News

Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

ascii.textfiles.com

151–153 of 153 posts

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and "beige box" off a COCOT... I think you mean red box. Red boxing was when you generated, or just recorded/played back the tones for different coins. The idea was to trick the phone into thinking you put in money. We only had one customer owned payphone we knew about that it worked on, but it was glorious.(even though we had noone to call) A beige box is a telephone cable with alligator clips on the one end. You…

I definitely mean "beige box." Red boxes were (mainly?) for telephone company phones that would recognize the coin tones. Those phones had a different line "class of service" at the switch end and the critical point is that red-boxing was the only way (post blue-box era anyway) to get free calls off of them. Well, at least that I knew of. But a COCOT had all the "pay phone magic" embedded in the phone itself - the li…

by the time I learned about them, red boxes didnt work on telco payphones. we had one customer owned one in a pizza shop, it looked like an old fashioned beige desk phone, but had equipment tacked on to take money. That was the only one we could get it to work with.

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#152
post #63

I thought the point in debinding was to use an autofeeder - to make the actual scanning less labor intensive. Wouldn't a camera based scanner be better? It still requires manual page turning, but will save on the prep work and destroying the magazines, even if just to sell on. The paper and ink quality will present they're own issues, but maybe those will be quicker to solve than the debinding and page feeding proces…

In magazines there's a thing called full bleed, where the image goes to the edge of the paper, and the gutter between pages is glued together so cutting, shaving or flattening will still lose some image as the binding process isn't consistent, so to save as much image as possible, they're going to the trouble to be the archival standard, after all, he decided the deglue is best. Great article.

Re: Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

#153
This is something I know a little about. Back in 2005/06 I asked Google who was doing non-destructive scanning of their books as I needed to scan our back issues to 1948 and no one would let me cut up bound volumes. They put me in touch with Kirtas Technologies that did the job for something like $20K and took two weeks (about 70 volumes). It's a lot cheaper now and the scanning quality is significantly better but the big headache is indexing.

Since then I've been collecting spare issues of the magazine and last year sent a decade's worth off to be destructively scanned for about $6K. The quality is significantly better than the originals (and they have to do clean up as part of the process).

I point this out to show what a challenging job is being attempted here and how really there is value and hard work in digitizing archives so there really shouldn't be an expectation of old stuff being 'free'.

Post reply on HN