A coworker gave me a scanner from 1998. Yes, its big claim to fame is that it was "Windows 98 ready!" The exclamation point is theirs, not mine.

As an aside, I love working in GeekLand. Where else can you ask on an email list for a scanner and get one? Actually, it wasn't quite that easy. They have a "For Free" email list for employees to subscribe to. When someone has some stuff they want to get rid of, but don't want the risk of Craigslist or the headache and hassle of eBay, they send a FreeCycle-like email to this list, and it becomes a game of chance on who gets it.

In this case, I asked for a scanner, and someone said, "I forgot who asked, but I do have one, and I'm offering it." I missed the first time, but the winner failed to show so my benefactor offered it again, and this time I won.

(I've seen some wi.fi routers, some speaker stands, some video cards go through that list, too.)

So, I have a scanner from Ye Olden Dayes. Here's a quick note (primarily for me, in case I need to pave my machine and rebuild it) on how to make it talk XP.

The short form is, Umax has not seen fit to release drivers for download. Instead, they offer a CD for sale at $15. I'm not sure they charge shipping -- I simply went with the internet.

The trick here is to first install vs355u.exe, reboot, and then install 2xxx_XP_upd.exe to get it to work. (Who comes up with these names, anyhow? 2xxx_XP_upd sounds like some description for an adult theater.)

SK is a would-be writer. She wrote the first few chapters for a barely-fictionalized autobio, then the disk was lost. My fault, I'm the one responsible for data backup, etc.

Anyhow, the file was lost, and that waylaid her. She didn't want to recreate those two chapters, so they existed only as a stack of papers.

Thanks to the magic of the scanner, they now also exist as a collection of TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) files. All I need is some free OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software and I have a great Mother's Day gift for her.