TT2: Forgotten Magazine - Bar Code News
Added 2025-11-10 15:15:28 +0000 UTCHello!
When I'm researching a topic for a video I find I get the most complete picture when I go too far into the subject and related things. Knowing where you cross the line between relevant or not lets me know what is needed to present the whole story. When I was researching the Cauzin Softstrip video I was going down the rabbit hole of Byte->Bar Codes->Carl Helmers and ran into a wall when I found that Carl left Byte to create a magazine all about bar codes which would have been directly related to the video. But there is NOTHING about that magazine online...until now.
This is a 1983 issue of Bar Code News which was created by Carl Helmers who was the former editor for Byte magazine. I've been looking for any information about this magazine since the Cauzin video and managing to get an issue myself was a fantastic score. So I wanted to go through the entire thing on camera so there is at least some record out there of what this magazine was about.
I will be scanning this issue later and putting it on archive.org, this is just my mostly-first look at it and a rough way to be able to share it with some context on why it's interesting as I provide some anecdotes. And I was so excited to finally have something to show that this magazine existed and wanted to share it as soon as I could!
Video Link: https://youtu.be/ty0sOlF4XPs
Comments
The Lowrey ad in there is for a company that was still in business a few years ago. My company bought some devices from them.
ELwoodBermuda
2025-11-16 07:31:56 +0000 UTCI loved that video, thanks for sharing this! Did you know that german Label printing company Tesa (they created the Tesa tape, which is the german flavor of the Scotch tape) used modded Commodore SX-64's with custom kernal and custom basic and char ROMs to be used as mobile/portable label printers? And they used Facit 4511 printers, which have a special command language, incompatible to Epson ESC/P or anything common at that time. A small group of people (including me) are trying to reverse-engineer the ROMs, to be able to integrate it with more printer drivers. A small success just happened this week by managing to get the first print-out on an Epson FX#1 compatible printer. The Thread on Forum64 goes way back, but the last couple pages show a bit of the recent progress (for those interested: https://www.forum64.de/index.php?thread/4087-der-tesa-sx-64/&postID=2357680#post2357680). You'll probably need to use online translation ;-)
The 8-Bit Theory
2025-11-10 18:07:19 +0000 UTC
