Talk:TWAIN

message: I say that, far from being technology without an interesting name, TWAIN is far SUPERIOR to other names that merely use cold and functional acronyms. USB? TCP/IP? SCSI? IDE? They're devoid of something human. TWAIN makes you wonder, then you find ut where it's from, one of our great poets, and just maybe you start reading his works as a result. There's a artistic depth to the name, a character lacking in more or less every other computer standard's name. I'm sorry if this isn't the forum to say this, but it had to be said... By me...  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.73.34.109 (talk) 07:25, 30 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  A VERY Interesting Name 

message: I left a sentence about the word TWAIN in the first paragraph.
I did so although the sentence is not important enough for the first paragraph of an article.
This article (and its original in FOLDOC) says that the word TWAIN is not an acronym but was taken from a famous poem.
However, the phrase "Technology Without ..." is so famous that it has twice been added in the first sentence of this article inconsistently.
I could just erase it.
But if I had done so, it will soon be added again.
If I were believing TWAIN an acronym, I would immediately jump to adding the phrase in the first sentence proudly.
That is why I left the phrase "Technology Without ..." near the first sentence.
--Kanjy 15:07, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  The word TWAIN is not an acronym 

message: At 19:29 UTC 5 February 2006, Mr./Ms. 81.157.144.178 contributed the following sentence.
Interesting.
I tried to find the sources in several search engines, but got nothing.
We only publish material that is verifiable with reference to reliable, published sources.
Could someone please find any source?
:Some also claim that the name originates from a techie in-joke; that because there was no name for the driver, someone dubbed it a "twain driver" (ie. toddler-speak for "train driver").
--Kanjy 11:07, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  The name originates from a techie in-joke? 

message: Over the years, there has been some discussion about origin of the TWAIN name.  Nobody seems to know exactly why it was given.  Even the standards body that created it (and ought to know) references the Free Online Dictionary entry with no further comment.
The definition there is largely accurate, but incomplete.  Because no official acronym was chosen, confusion occurs as people make up their own meanings and then assert or argue it based on hearsay.  Amusingly, I saw the issue discussed in the alt.battlestar-gallactica Usenet groups as recently as Oct 2005.
As I was present in the meeting where the name TWAIN was selected for the standard, I thought I might add some background to the issue for the curious.  Not that I think it's a particularly interesting discussion.  But the fact that the name is in capital letters, combined with nobody knowing for sure why there is no official acronym, seems to produce a sort of cognitive dissonance where people feel the need to fill the void.
HP Greeley R&D
So.  Back in 1992 the meeting took place in a Dilbert-style cubicle at Hewlett-Packard's Greeley, Colorado office, the source of the original ScanJet line of scanners.  HP was involved in the standard's working group committee, and the cubicle was occupied by Kevin Bier, an R&D engineer who was serving as HP's representative to the committee, and who had been serving as its chairman.  Also present was Jim Graham and myself, engineers in the same R&D lab, and working on various projects related to scanners, back in the day when they were designed and manufactured in one building with no overseas assistance.
It was more of a gripe session than an official meeting.  Jim and Kevin were lamenting news from corporate legal that the most recent in a string of rejected standards names, "Direct Connect," was also unavailable due to trademark conflicts.  This was back in the day when you couldn't just Google a name to see whether it was being used commercially.  I was present only because my cubicle was directly across the divider from Kevin's and I was investigating an expletive followed by a slam of a telephone handset into its cradle.
There was a deadline for a name because the initial PR for the standard was being prepared, to be introduced in Byte magazine, at the time a popular rag for the personal computer crowd.  Teresa Simske, a colleague at HP, was doing the preparation and had been asking Kevin what the standard should be called.  With a hint of exasperation, Kevin commented that he was going to have to call her back and say that she would have call it "the spec without a name," referring to the "specification" -- the document which described the exact functioning of the standard, down to the API level.
Refinement
A split-second later, either Kevin or Jim (I can't remember precisely which, or in what order because of the commotion it caused) lit up and said "The spec without an interesting name!" and "Hey, Twain, then it's actually a word!"  Hilarity ensued, with references to Mark Twain and the Kipling poem, and with the winking acknowledgement that it would be fun to take an absurd chain of events like this and get to put it into what would otherwise be a dry, technical document.  The 1.0 version of the standard was almost completed, and there was some punchiness about this because of the irony of doing all that work, and having the most pressing issue being the bestowing of a name.
I didn't participate in the phone calls and whatever other activity it took to make the name official.  Presumably the other members of the working group were also weary of the name search and so did not take much convincing.  Like many people who successfully chair standards committees, Kevin had good people skills and so I guess had no difficulty convincing them.  Another detail is that Kevin recounted a phone conversation with Teresa about the unwieldiness of the name, and they came to agreement that the word "spec" was not important, and so "Technology" would replace "The spec" to produce Technology Without An Interesting Name for the PR release.
Toolkit
There have also been references to "Toolkit" instead of "Technology" Without an Interesting Name as well.  One example is this post from Bob Gann, who was also an R&D engineer at the time on the hardware side of the original ScanJet projects.
The word "toolkit" refers to the various software components that accompanied the specification, with reference source implementations, C programming language headers, example programs, etc.  I remember the term being used within the lab in the months after the naming incident -- note the date of the post -- and so one might interpret it as an equally valid expansion of the acronym.
There it is, for what it's worth.  So the acronym does "haunt" the standard as FOLDOC says, but only because the working group doesn't state there existed an actual acronym, or is hesitant to adopt it (grin).
And Who are You?
The reader might ask what qualification I have to state this information authoritatively, to which I can only answer, "I was there," which has its limits.  I went on to author the original Macintosh TWAIN Source for the HP ScanJet series that served as an early implementation reference, edited docs, as well as performed application side implementation for the Macintosh version of Adobe Photoshop.  Mike Niquette, another HP engineer performed similarly on the Windows side.
Later, I authored the ScannerBe standard for the now defunct BeOS.  Jim Graham, Kevin Bier, Mike Niquette, and Teresa Simske have gone on to other things, both in and out of HP.  Having left HP in 1993, I can't comment on whether the FOLDOC description about an acronym contest actually occurred, but it hadn't to my knowledge before then.  Some other engineers I knew at HP are still there, I wonder what they might say about it?
--Jmoy 01:02, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Origin of the Name 

message: I queried Kevin for his input on the issue of the TWAIN name, and he has weighed in on the subject.  Any discrepancies between my discussion account above and his article account should be weighed in favor of his, since he was instrumental its development.
Jmoy 22:23, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: For the record, Wikipedia is the source for this, as Kevin recorded it here (first)?  It is great to have an quality answer for this common question; hopefully someone (preferrably Kevin) will note this in a more reliable source, as I would not be surprised if some enterprising person decided to remove it from Wikipedia in order to make a point about WP:OR. John Vandenberg 02:35, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Authoritative answer on the name 

message: According to TWAIN's Website, specification 2 is hoping to be available for 64-bit OSes as well as Unix/linux.  Should this be included in the article? Madd the sane 06:38, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  TWAIN specification 2 

message: "The word TWAIN is from Rudyard Kipling's "The Ballad of East and West""
This makes it sound like Rudyard Kipling invented the word "twain". This should read more like "The name TWAIN is taken from the context of Rudyard Kiplings "The Ballad of East and West"" 
"Twain" also means "two".  A "Twain" was used as a measure of depth on the Mississippi River boats.  A "Twain" was two fathoms or 12 feet.  It was a mark on a rope with a weight or a pole that was used to measure the rivers depth.  Two fathoms was called out as "Mark, Twain".  Samuel Clemmons used it for his nom de plume.
Just my opinion, left the article as it is. 129.118.139.131 (talk) 21:27, 31 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  The word "Twain" 

message: Do we have anyone in the readership of this article who might be interested in adding some technical information to this technology article? I came here hoping to learn things about TWAIN standards, APIs, and drivers, but the article currently seems to be more of a TWAIN Working Group press release. Thanks for any assistance. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 23:59, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Technical info, please 

message: I've removed the line saying "* An alternative to TWAIN is WIA".
TWAIN in an open source, cross-platform software protocol.
WIA is a WINDOWS driver model  and API.
TWAIN MAY be an alternative to WIA, but the reciprocal is NOT true.  HuGo_87 (talk) 16:45, 10 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  WIA as an alternative to TWAIN 

message: * Chapter 22: Scanners, The Winn L. Rosch Hardware Bible, By Winn L. Rosch, Que Publishing, 2003, Page 783, When the Twain interface was being developed, it wore a number of different names. The most common of these were Direct-Connect and CLASP
* Vendor coalition's API to aid imaging systems, By Joanne Cummings ,Page 2 -Page 70, 21 Oct 1991, Network World, Known as the Connecting Link for Applications and Source Peripherals (CLASP),
* ASK BYTE: What's in a Name?, Page 309, Byte Magazine Volume 17 Number 09, SEPTEMBER 1992, CLASP's name has changed to TWAIN (Toolkit Without An Important Name).
::— Preceding unsigned comment added by So-retro-it-hurts (talk • contribs) 10:11, 24 April 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Direct Connect & CLASP are initial names for TWAIN  

message: Hello.  I am finding myself repeatedly archiving links on this page.  This usually happens when the archive doesn't recognize the archive to be good.
This could be because the link is either a redirect, or I am unknowingly archiving a dead link.Please check the following links to see if it's redirecting, or in anyway bad, and fix them, if possible.
* http://www.twainforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=10113&sid=7f0b04f65e5cc370659770f3c55e173c
* http://www.kodakalaris.com
* http://scantwain.wiki.sourceforge.net/
In any event this will be the only notification in regards to these links, and I will discontinue my attempts to archive the page.
Cheers.—cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 12:18, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Trouble archiving links on the article 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified  on TWAIN. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Replaced archive link https://web.archive.org/web/20120308025220/http://www.twain.org/abouttwain.shtm with https://web.archive.org/web/20120308025220/http://www.twain.org/abouttwain.shtm on http://www.twain.org/abouttwain.shtm
*Replaced archive link https://web.archive.org/web/20110927212506/http://www.twain.org/docs/?M=A with https://web.archive.org/web/20110927212506/http://www.twain.org/docs/?M=A on http://www.twain.org/docs/?M=A
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Cheers.—cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 04:26, 11 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Is this technology obsolete? Has something else replaced it? Doesn't seem like there is current development or any products that use it. --Navstar (talk) 00:06, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Obsolete? 

message: I just got a Canon LIDE 300 scanner and no mention is made of TWAIN in the instructions or the actual software interface. Has TWAIN been superseded or replaced? 76.130.134.87 (talk) 16:53, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Do newer scanners use TWAIN?