Linda J. Burke

Assignment No. 8
Educational Technology Timeline

First CCD Flatbed Scanner

Events in 1975

Opti-Books, 2005

Events in 2005

First CCD Flatbed Scanner, 1975

CCD, "Charge Coupled Device" flatbed scanners, which are ubiquitous today, did not exist back the early 1970s when Ray Kurzweil and his team at Kurzweil Computer Products created the Kurzweil Reading Machine and the first omni-font OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology. The Kurzweil team created its own scanner using the first CCD integrated chip, a 500 sensor linear array from Fairchild.

Since 500 pixels was not sufficient resolution for one side of a page, the Kurzweil scanner scanned a horizontal strip of the page about 1.2 inches in height.  Since the first Kurzweil Reading Machine only had 64K of RAM, it could not afford to buffer the image of an entire strip, let alone the entire page, and thus the optical character recognition was performed on the fly. The Kurzweil scanner and computer, under control of the reading machine software, tracked a single line, located the characters, performed the OCR and the speech synthesis in synchrony with the scanner cameras' movement.
Adapted from: http://www.webpresence.com/kurzweiltech/techfirsts/techfirsts.htm
Flatbed Scanner. Other related discoveries can also be found at this page.

This was the first practical optical scanner technology.

Future - Opti-Books
July 27, 2005

Books will now be published which are dual format - Opti-books, which can be read as print books, but they also have a CD-Rom inbedded in the back.  You can place a book reader on the CD-Rom, punch in the page you want to begin on, and the reading device will read the book.  Illustrations can be viewed by inserting the CD-Rom into a computer. The books and the device will come on the market in time for Christmas.  This trend should replace audio-tape talking books because of its flexibility to be used anywhere, anytime.

Events in 1975

April

• Bill Gates and Paul Allen found Micro-Soft (the hyphen is later dropped). [41] (July [346.26]) (August [346.257])
• MITS delivers the first generally-available Altair 8800, sold for US$375 with 1KB memory. [208.67] (256 bytes  [266.38])
• Fall of Saigon

September
     The first issue of Byte magazine is published. [9] [266.159]

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest nominated for Best Picture

Events in 2005

• Newest model Gateway-Dell computers are sold without mouses as voice-activated technology is now standard
• Apple computers will try for another market comeback with the latest new product - a computer which is worn as a helmet.
• US census bureau figures indicate that the technology gap between white and non-white groups is slowly closing, aided by the development of computers which sell for under $500.