Hand-Drawn Barcodes for the HP41

[vassilisprevelakis]

Back in the 80s I got a Wand from UPLE (Users Program Library, Europe) as a reward for submitting a bunch of programs to the library.

So I was trying to find a way to print barcodes. Eventually I found out that the computing lab had a Diablo daisywheel printer in the machine room for high quality copies and got permission to use it.

The barcodes produced where a bit narrow, but quite usable, especially when using the TITAN-10 daisywheel which had a tall | character.

The way to print barcodes was to set the daisywheel character spacing to almost nothing, and print about 10 | characters for a narrow bar and double that for a wide bar.

Clearly to print a line of program barcode, the printer would hammer away like a machine gun.

So the first time the operators tried to print one of my test bar codes, they had the scare of their life. Eventually they had me supply a sample with each print run, so that they would know what to expect.

:-)

**vp