Datastrip Code

File Format
Name	Datastrip Code
Ontology	Physical File Formats Bar codes Datastrip Code
Released	1985

Datastrip Code, originally Softstrip, is reportedly the first 2D bar code symbology, released in 1985. (But the comedy book, The 80s: A Look Back, published in 1979, had fake 2D bar codes in it.) The intended purpose was as a way for magazines to publish computer-readable data, such as program listings (which, in those days, were commonly printed in computer magazines such that the user would have to type them in).

Links

• Wikipedia article (under the title Cauzin Softstrip)
• US Patent 4,728,783
• 1985 New York Times article
• 1987 review (8000 Plus magazine, issue 15, December 1987, p40) - includes sample barcode
• Pictures of Softstrip hardware and sample barcode
• Combating terrorism at sea with Datastrip (press release)
• Datastrip Code info
• Cauzin Softstrip Application Notes & Marketing Material (1986), at the Internet Archive.
• ANTIC Interview 115 - Atari podcast interviews Cauzin staffers Bob Brass and Peter D’Amato (Oct 2015).
• 2016 blog post by "FozzTexx" (Chris Osborn) reverse-engineering some details
  • Distripitor, a 2016 barcode generator (in Objective-C; apparently depends on ClearLake and Makefiles from the same author to build)
  • Description of decoding a freshly-generated Softstrip as part of a challenge (Will Sowerbutts, Sep 2016). Includes a Python decoder (not fully general).
• Reverse Engineering The Cauzin Softstrip. Michael Reimsbach, MSc thesis at Michael Reimsbach. Technical Report – STL-TR-2018-03 (series ISSN 2364-7167). October 2018.
  • Describes the Softstrip format in detail, and differences from the later Datastrip format. Points to a corpus of examples (contempory and modern).
  • Cauzin Softstrip decoder software
• Decoding the Cauzin Softstrip: a case study in extracting information from old media. Reimsbach, M., Aycock, J. Arch Sci 21, 281–294 (2021).