I stumbled across the article about the ThunderScan in about 2012 when looking for info about ImageWriter II upgrades, and have been slightly obsessed ever since. It's such a brilliant idea - a higher resolution scanner, that was far lower in cost than its competitors, achieved by reusing the paper transport that most customers already had.
I'm lucky enough to own two working ThunderScans now (and one third one that I needed the software driver from). They work exactly as advertised, and it's a joy to see them zip across the page, digitising line by line.
The software by Hertzfeld is another joy to use. The scrolling, which Hertzfeld calls "inertial scrolling" in that article, is now familiar to us all who have used touchscreen devices. It's funny to think that the feature that wowed so many at the 2007 iPhone launch actually existed all the way back in 1984, designed by one of the key creators of the Macintosh.
I wish there were more creative hacks like this - I just know that if a company tried to do something similar today, the printer manufacturer would instantly roll out an update to break this functionality.
People today (or maybe just businesses) seem thoroughly uninterested in interoperability or upgradability.
It's a fantastic ideal for nerds who like to repair and upgrade and Frankenstein tech bits into new shapes, but I'm not sure I've ever met a normal person who was interested in adding a feature to an existing widget instead of buying a new widget.
I'm absolutely certain this is because it's less profitable for businesses to offer upgradable or interoperable parts.
I wonder why the system didn't caught on and why it's not used today by manufacturers of multi-functional printers. Seems like a huge opportunity to use the existing paper handling mechanism - with an autofeeder, a feature most flatbeds lack! - and get a more compact device.
The entire device consists of a single, cheap CMOS image sensor, a lens focused at a fixed distance and a RGB led. Everything else, stitching the resulting scanbands, correcting for mechanical and optical distortions, etc. is all in software. The native optical resolution you could expect from, say, a 1080x720 px sensor would be something like 2400 DPI.
The only downside i can think is that you can't scan IDs, passports etc. and the location near the inkjet head tends to get dirty.
Canon tried with some Bubblejet printers, like BJC4300. It needed three passes per line (R,G,B) slow and lower quality.
I think also it was expensive, since I wanted to get it, but failed to find it.
OTOH, a 10 year old HP multifunction can scan things at 600DPI in acceptable quality and detail, in a very reasonable amount of time.
If you want to go compact, but fast, there's Kodak Alaris' "i" series scanners which can scan both sides at the same time. Scan time is ~4 seconds per double sided A5 page at 600DPI, and less than a second for ~200 DPI.
Interesting. The drawbacks you describe seem to be limitations of the sensor and image processing technology available almost 30 years ago.
For example, my Epson inkjet printer can do about 10ppm at it's lowest print quality, so it can mechanically move and scan a page against the printhead every 6 seconds; a 1Mpx sensor with a 60Hz frame rate will generate 360Mpx in 6 seconds. Even if you throw away 50% of the data (overlap areas, next page load, motion or optical blur at the edges etc.), that's still enough data for a ~1400 dpi raw resolution of an A4 page at the fastest speed. If you are willing to go slower, the resolutions the system could achieve seem outside the range of any flatbed.
Of course, you would need e very beefy image processor to handle the multiple Gbps raw video data and process in real time down to the final scan image, but the actual corrections seem very achievable with modern algorithms.
Outside of the cost of the image processor, another showstopper I can see is motion blur on the sensor, stopping the heavy printhead from its inertia, so that you can have a still image, will kill your total scan speed. But perhaps you can just pulse the LED, or a gas discharge lamp, and impress the sensor with near instantaneous flashes of light.
I had a Canon scan cartridge around 1999. It was slow, but worse, it was very finicky about the printer cable being used - which at the time could be very expensive and were not included.
It worked, but there was a clear linear pattern across scans. It worked for some things, but wasn’t the best for photos.
I have an HP All In One and I was quite disappointed when I first used it to digitize photos. It's nowhere near 600DPI. The quality I got from the scanner was worse than taking a picture with my phone!
Of course taking a picture with the phone requires good lighting and the photos you want to scan need to be flat.
You can get cheap, compact scanners that just feed the paper through instead of laying it on a flat pane of glass. Almost the same thing except not multifunctional and with a page width sensor instead of one that would scan back and forth.
It precludes many of the advantages of a flatbed scanner (such as scanning book pages without requiring removal of the pages), which existed at the same time as the Thunderscan. Things like hand scanners established themselves at the low-end by the early 90s.
IIRC, one of the 8-bit Atari magazines had an article describing a similar setup back in the mid/later 80s. Basically, put a photoresistor in a shroud (I used the cap from a Bic pen and some electrical tape), attach it to the dot matrix print head and wire it to the Atari joystick port's analog/paddle input. Place a bright light over the printer. Then the software told the printer to move the print head back and forth while it read the port value. The image quality was terrible but it was a fun project.
100,000 units sold, software royalty of $7.50 a unit -- I make that a little over $2M in today's money. Not bad for what seems to have been about two months work.
That really is the dream, isn’t it. To find work that is interesting, impactful, that you are uniquely qualified to do, and to be compensated handsomely for it.
It was probably easier to come by in 1987. Nowadays if you have a unique idea in computing, there’s 40 years’ worth of computing professionals around to step in and take the job.
When I first saw the $7.50 royalty, I was thinking he’d make a decent payday as long as they sell 10K-20K of the things. Very surprised they sold 100K seems like a lot for the mid-80s for a relatively niche Mac accessory.
Everyone with a Mac had an ImageWriter
printer; the scanner attachment was, by far, the cheapest way to add scanning capability. Many people bought them to add the capability, not because they needed them already.
A little later, the LaserWriter printer became the first generally affordable laser printer. But it was affordable only if you were rich or had a business case for it. The sub-thousand dollar laser printer took quite a few more years.
And even though networking was envisioned from the start of the Mac, Apple basically had to rush to finish AppleTalk networking in time for the release of the LaserWriter since it was so expensive it was assumed the only way anyone could justify the purchase price was to share it with an office workgroup rather than connect to a single workstation. It took 2 more years for Apple to finally introduce file sharing over their own network.
Neat! I remember this thing from when I was a kid. We didn't have an Imagewriter printer so it wasn't an option for me. Having a scanner back in those days would have been amazing.
Loved the Thunderscan back in the day. In college I worked at a little computer store in Harvard Square that didn’t bother to stock real scanners — students who could afford them had better places to buy gear. One day this nice guy came in looking for a scanner and I did my absolute best to sell him on a Thunderscan based on the price point. “I’m not telling you the quality is as high as a flat bed scanner, but it’s so affordable!”
After he left and after the store owner stopped laughing, she explained that I’d been trying to sell Robin Williams on the basis of price. I like to think he enjoyed being treated like a guy off the street.
I sat next to a random person on a flight once. Everyone walking on the plane was gawking at him, shaking his hand, while I sat unphased working on my ability to make a voip call over the new wifi system on united airlines. I eventually looked up who was sitting next to me and found out it was Daryl McDaniels (DMC of Run DMC fame). We both happened to check bags, so I walked up to him and actually apologized for not giving him the same attention that everyone else was on the plane. He laughed and said it felt great to have a flight where the people around him didn't talk his ear off. He gave me a signed autograph and his phone number and then we both went our separate ways.
I just found his autograph while cleaning last night.. now after seeing this comment, I'm going to give him a call tomorrow :)
Man, I love stuff like this! The hardware aspect of these things is always the most impressive to me. I make plenty of small software tools, as I’m sure many HN readers do, but designing and building bespoke hardware that interacts with said software is on another level entirely - especially considering they didn’t have 3D printers.
My school had one, it wasn't perfect and there were occasionally gaps between scanned lines but it let us scan in photographs and newspaper clippings for local history projects.
Wow, this is a clever hack! Turning a printer into a scanner is such a simple yet elegant solution — reminds me how creative people can get with hardware limitations. Makes me wonder what other “hidden” functionalities old devices could have if we just experiment a bit.
Another oddity re. the ImageWriter. There was even a color ribbon for the printer as I recall. The early Mac, even though black and white, had some very primitive color attributes buried in the "Mac Toolbox" (ROM) that, while not allowing you to display color on those devices, could in fact send simple color to the ImageWriter with said ribbon.
I feel like MacDraw (or some other lesser-known app — not MacPaint) exposed this functionality.
I remember feeling like the color ribbon was so eye-wateringly expensive that we bought *one* and kept it in a zip lock bag except when we wanted a color print. Usually from The Print Shop. I was young (aged 10 - 15), and it probably wasn't really that expensive. My parents were willing to help with equipment, but we had to pay for consumables ourselves. So any ink, floppies, telephone fees for dialing into BBSs were on us, and we were as stingy about them as you'd expect from kids with limited opportunities to earn money.
I vaguely remember that AppleWriter on the Apple IIe exposed the escape sequence it used for character-mode print commands like bold and underline to the user. You could change the command to escape sequence maps right from inside the program. I re-mapped bold to cyan, and underline to magenta just to see magic color come from that printer. That one day in 1996 was probably the only time that printer ever printed in color, and probably my first time to see a printer print in color.
I stumbled across the article about the ThunderScan in about 2012 when looking for info about ImageWriter II upgrades, and have been slightly obsessed ever since. It's such a brilliant idea - a higher resolution scanner, that was far lower in cost than its competitors, achieved by reusing the paper transport that most customers already had.
I'm lucky enough to own two working ThunderScans now (and one third one that I needed the software driver from). They work exactly as advertised, and it's a joy to see them zip across the page, digitising line by line.
The software by Hertzfeld is another joy to use. The scrolling, which Hertzfeld calls "inertial scrolling" in that article, is now familiar to us all who have used touchscreen devices. It's funny to think that the feature that wowed so many at the 2007 iPhone launch actually existed all the way back in 1984, designed by one of the key creators of the Macintosh.
I wish there were more creative hacks like this - I just know that if a company tried to do something similar today, the printer manufacturer would instantly roll out an update to break this functionality.
People today (or maybe just businesses) seem thoroughly uninterested in interoperability or upgradability.
It's a fantastic ideal for nerds who like to repair and upgrade and Frankenstein tech bits into new shapes, but I'm not sure I've ever met a normal person who was interested in adding a feature to an existing widget instead of buying a new widget.
I'm absolutely certain this is because it's less profitable for businesses to offer upgradable or interoperable parts.
I wonder why the system didn't caught on and why it's not used today by manufacturers of multi-functional printers. Seems like a huge opportunity to use the existing paper handling mechanism - with an autofeeder, a feature most flatbeds lack! - and get a more compact device.
The entire device consists of a single, cheap CMOS image sensor, a lens focused at a fixed distance and a RGB led. Everything else, stitching the resulting scanbands, correcting for mechanical and optical distortions, etc. is all in software. The native optical resolution you could expect from, say, a 1080x720 px sensor would be something like 2400 DPI.
The only downside i can think is that you can't scan IDs, passports etc. and the location near the inkjet head tends to get dirty.
Canon tried with some Bubblejet printers, like BJC4300. It needed three passes per line (R,G,B) slow and lower quality.
I think also it was expensive, since I wanted to get it, but failed to find it.
OTOH, a 10 year old HP multifunction can scan things at 600DPI in acceptable quality and detail, in a very reasonable amount of time.
If you want to go compact, but fast, there's Kodak Alaris' "i" series scanners which can scan both sides at the same time. Scan time is ~4 seconds per double sided A5 page at 600DPI, and less than a second for ~200 DPI.
That thing zips, but is not cheap.
Interesting. The drawbacks you describe seem to be limitations of the sensor and image processing technology available almost 30 years ago.
For example, my Epson inkjet printer can do about 10ppm at it's lowest print quality, so it can mechanically move and scan a page against the printhead every 6 seconds; a 1Mpx sensor with a 60Hz frame rate will generate 360Mpx in 6 seconds. Even if you throw away 50% of the data (overlap areas, next page load, motion or optical blur at the edges etc.), that's still enough data for a ~1400 dpi raw resolution of an A4 page at the fastest speed. If you are willing to go slower, the resolutions the system could achieve seem outside the range of any flatbed.
Of course, you would need e very beefy image processor to handle the multiple Gbps raw video data and process in real time down to the final scan image, but the actual corrections seem very achievable with modern algorithms.
Outside of the cost of the image processor, another showstopper I can see is motion blur on the sensor, stopping the heavy printhead from its inertia, so that you can have a still image, will kill your total scan speed. But perhaps you can just pulse the LED, or a gas discharge lamp, and impress the sensor with near instantaneous flashes of light.
I had a Canon scan cartridge around 1999. It was slow, but worse, it was very finicky about the printer cable being used - which at the time could be very expensive and were not included.
It worked, but there was a clear linear pattern across scans. It worked for some things, but wasn’t the best for photos.
I have an HP All In One and I was quite disappointed when I first used it to digitize photos. It's nowhere near 600DPI. The quality I got from the scanner was worse than taking a picture with my phone!
Of course taking a picture with the phone requires good lighting and the photos you want to scan need to be flat.
Interesting. What’s the model of yours? Mine is an old Deskjet 4515.
https://support.hp.com/de-de/drivers/hp-color-laserjet-pro-m...
You can get cheap, compact scanners that just feed the paper through instead of laying it on a flat pane of glass. Almost the same thing except not multifunctional and with a page width sensor instead of one that would scan back and forth.
It precludes many of the advantages of a flatbed scanner (such as scanning book pages without requiring removal of the pages), which existed at the same time as the Thunderscan. Things like hand scanners established themselves at the low-end by the early 90s.
IIRC, one of the 8-bit Atari magazines had an article describing a similar setup back in the mid/later 80s. Basically, put a photoresistor in a shroud (I used the cap from a Bic pen and some electrical tape), attach it to the dot matrix print head and wire it to the Atari joystick port's analog/paddle input. Place a bright light over the printer. Then the software told the printer to move the print head back and forth while it read the port value. The image quality was terrible but it was a fun project.
If you think that resolution is terrible, you should've tried my lightpen-based "scanner." ;)
100,000 units sold, software royalty of $7.50 a unit -- I make that a little over $2M in today's money. Not bad for what seems to have been about two months work.
That really is the dream, isn’t it. To find work that is interesting, impactful, that you are uniquely qualified to do, and to be compensated handsomely for it.
It was probably easier to come by in 1987. Nowadays if you have a unique idea in computing, there’s 40 years’ worth of computing professionals around to step in and take the job.
When I first saw the $7.50 royalty, I was thinking he’d make a decent payday as long as they sell 10K-20K of the things. Very surprised they sold 100K seems like a lot for the mid-80s for a relatively niche Mac accessory.
Everyone with a Mac had an ImageWriter printer; the scanner attachment was, by far, the cheapest way to add scanning capability. Many people bought them to add the capability, not because they needed them already.
A little later, the LaserWriter printer became the first generally affordable laser printer. But it was affordable only if you were rich or had a business case for it. The sub-thousand dollar laser printer took quite a few more years.
And even though networking was envisioned from the start of the Mac, Apple basically had to rush to finish AppleTalk networking in time for the release of the LaserWriter since it was so expensive it was assumed the only way anyone could justify the purchase price was to share it with an office workgroup rather than connect to a single workstation. It took 2 more years for Apple to finally introduce file sharing over their own network.
Neat! I remember this thing from when I was a kid. We didn't have an Imagewriter printer so it wasn't an option for me. Having a scanner back in those days would have been amazing.
There is a nice reverse engineering of the Thunderscan here: https://beefchicken.com/retro/thunderscan/
On the topic of using things beyond their intended purpose: kitchen scale + 3D printer = force gauge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciBrPYYRMYM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_fixedness
Loved the Thunderscan back in the day. In college I worked at a little computer store in Harvard Square that didn’t bother to stock real scanners — students who could afford them had better places to buy gear. One day this nice guy came in looking for a scanner and I did my absolute best to sell him on a Thunderscan based on the price point. “I’m not telling you the quality is as high as a flat bed scanner, but it’s so affordable!”
After he left and after the store owner stopped laughing, she explained that I’d been trying to sell Robin Williams on the basis of price. I like to think he enjoyed being treated like a guy off the street.
I sat next to a random person on a flight once. Everyone walking on the plane was gawking at him, shaking his hand, while I sat unphased working on my ability to make a voip call over the new wifi system on united airlines. I eventually looked up who was sitting next to me and found out it was Daryl McDaniels (DMC of Run DMC fame). We both happened to check bags, so I walked up to him and actually apologized for not giving him the same attention that everyone else was on the plane. He laughed and said it felt great to have a flight where the people around him didn't talk his ear off. He gave me a signed autograph and his phone number and then we both went our separate ways.
I just found his autograph while cleaning last night.. now after seeing this comment, I'm going to give him a call tomorrow :)
Man, I love stuff like this! The hardware aspect of these things is always the most impressive to me. I make plenty of small software tools, as I’m sure many HN readers do, but designing and building bespoke hardware that interacts with said software is on another level entirely - especially considering they didn’t have 3D printers.
I was aware of Canon's mid-90s attempt at the same thing: Canon IS-32 Color Image Scanner Cartridge.
While the Canon may be the first color-capable unit, it's interesting to see it wasn't the first ever!
I had one. It was a great product. I could never have afforded a flatbed, but I had an ImageWriter and plenty of time.
Early on I used it to make a picture of Madonna with a fish stuck through her head.
I definitely downloaded pornography in the 90’s with a “Thunderscan” watermark on the corner.
Was that a feature of the software? Or did the person scanning add it to brag about their rig, I wonder.
My school had one, it wasn't perfect and there were occasionally gaps between scanned lines but it let us scan in photographs and newspaper clippings for local history projects.
Thunderscan was used to scan the Japanese woodblock print permed by Steve Jobs that Susan Kate later touched up for the MacPaint box and manual art.
Wow, this is a clever hack! Turning a printer into a scanner is such a simple yet elegant solution — reminds me how creative people can get with hardware limitations. Makes me wonder what other “hidden” functionalities old devices could have if we just experiment a bit.
Another oddity re. the ImageWriter. There was even a color ribbon for the printer as I recall. The early Mac, even though black and white, had some very primitive color attributes buried in the "Mac Toolbox" (ROM) that, while not allowing you to display color on those devices, could in fact send simple color to the ImageWriter with said ribbon.
I feel like MacDraw (or some other lesser-known app — not MacPaint) exposed this functionality.
I remember feeling like the color ribbon was so eye-wateringly expensive that we bought *one* and kept it in a zip lock bag except when we wanted a color print. Usually from The Print Shop. I was young (aged 10 - 15), and it probably wasn't really that expensive. My parents were willing to help with equipment, but we had to pay for consumables ourselves. So any ink, floppies, telephone fees for dialing into BBSs were on us, and we were as stingy about them as you'd expect from kids with limited opportunities to earn money.
I vaguely remember that AppleWriter on the Apple IIe exposed the escape sequence it used for character-mode print commands like bold and underline to the user. You could change the command to escape sequence maps right from inside the program. I re-mapped bold to cyan, and underline to magenta just to see magic color come from that printer. That one day in 1996 was probably the only time that printer ever printed in color, and probably my first time to see a printer print in color.
There are still people making reproduction ImageWriter color ribbon cartridges for retrocomputing enthusiasts! https://maceffects.com/products/apple-imagewriter-ii-color-r...
This whole article great, but the best part is when he just casually drops that he invented inertial scrolling 20+ years before the iPhone.
Should be [2004/1984]
Great, now I learn about this when I used to have printers back in the 80's , 90's and 00's!