- Machine-readable medium
-
In telecommunication, a machine-readable medium (automated data medium) is a medium capable of storing data in a machine-readable format that can be accessed by an automated sensing device and capable of being turned into (practically in every case) some form of binary.
Examples of machine-readable media include (a) magnetic disks, cards, tapes, and drums, (b) punched cards and paper tapes, (c) optical disks, (d) barcodes and (e) magnetic ink characters.
Common machine-readable data storage and data transmission technologies include processing waveforms, optical character recognition (OCR) and barcodes. Any information retrievable by any form of energy can be machine-readable. Examples include:
- Acoustics
- Chemical
- Electrical
- Semiconductor used in volatile RAM microchips
- Floating-gate transistor used in non-volatile memory cards
- Radio transmission
- Magnetic storage
- Mechanical
- Pins and holes
- Punched card
- Paper tape
- Music box cylinder or disk
- Grooves (See also Audio Data)
- Phonograph cylinder
- Gramophone record
- DictaBelt (groove on plastic belt)
- Capacitance Electronic Disc
- Pins and holes
- Optics
- Thermodynamic
See also
References
This article incorporates public domain material from the General Services Administration document "Federal Standard 1037C".
This computer storage-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.