More about INTACTA.CODE

Written: Fri 20 Mar 2008

As I said on the home page, I (Ian Hawdon - AKA Dave Morrison) was first made aware of INTACTA.CODE in the spring of 2000 when it was featured on BBC's Tomorrow's World, there, Peter Snow was able to save a Microsoft Word document, print it as INTACTA.CODE, stab a hole through it, crumple it up, and throw it to his co-presenter, Philippa Forrester, who proceeded to scan it into her workstation. The INTACTA.CODE reader was able to successfully decode it (by correcting the damage done by Peter), and she was able to open the file! (If anyone has a copy of that part of the show, please email me at ian (at) op-ezy (dot) co (dot) uk)

The program used to read these files was available from the Tomorrow's World website (at the time it was at www.bbc.co.uk/tw though there is nothing there now!), and a different program was available at the INTACTA website (www.intacta.com), but they changed their site, and the program is no longer available there either, Archive.org's Wayback machine archived a broken copy of this program, resulting in an unopenable zip file!

Meanwhile, in Japan, Fujitsu made a deal with Intacta Technologies Ltd. and between 2001 and 2004 they shipped an INTACTA.CODE reader with their PCs in Japan. This program was only available in Japanese, but thanks to a bit of creative hacking, the program is now available in English on our downloads page!

Sadly, I still don't have a program that will actually make INTACTA.CODE files, and I have not got any replies from Intacta Technologies Ltd., if anyone has a program that will do it, also please email me at ian (at) op-ezy (dot) co (dot) uk.