1 rich Libsyn https://www.libsyn.com 90 600 Bob Brass and Peter D’Amato, Cauzin Softstrip If you read certain computer magazines from the early days of microcomputers — magazines like Byte, Family Computing, II Computing and InCider — you might see long, black-and-white strips of bar codes. Those are computer programs encoded for use with the Cauzin Softstrip reader. Introduced in 1985, the Cauzin Softstrip was a hardware peripheral that attached to your Apple //, Macintosh, or IBM computer (there was no Atari version.) It optically read the printed two-dimensional bar codes, which were published in those magazines and in books - allowing you to quickly input data - for instance, inputting programs without having to laboriously type them in. This interview is with two of the people at that company: Bob Brass was co-founder of Cauzin (along with Dr. Jack Goldman, who has passed away), and Peter D’Amato, who was Manager of OEM and VAR Support at Cauzin from 1984 through 1988. &amp;nbsp; This interview took place on October 5, 2015. Teaser quote: “I remember being stumped. How are we going to get something with gears to move 1/100 of a degree? It just won’t happen because the slop in a gear would exceed that. ... I said, ‘That’s it. We’re going to have a spiral gear, and we’ll have the equivalent of a phonograph arm and it will track to a hundredth of a degree without a problem.’” Links: Softstrip information: https://web.archive.org/web/20180322081142/http://softstrip.info/ Scans and documentation at Apple2Scans.net http://www.apple2scans.net/2015/12/20/cauzin-softstrip-reader-manuals-software-etc/ 1985 NY Times article about Cauzin: http://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/15/science/personal-computers-supermarket-bar-codes-are-applied-to-software.html Reverse Engineering The Cauzin Softstrip&amp;nbsp;(thesis published October 2018, two years after this interview) ANTIC The Atari 8-bit Podcast http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com <iframe title="Libsyn Player" style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/4068874/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/forward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/88AA3C/" height="90" width="600" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen oallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen></iframe> https://assets.libsyn.com/secure/item/4068874