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.

ISBN represented as EAN-13 bar code showing both machine-readable and human-readable data

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
  • Photochemical
• Electrical
  • Semiconductor used in volatile RAM microchips
  • Floating-gate transistor used in non-volatile memory cards
  • Radio transmission
• Magnetic storage
• Mechanical
  • Pins and holes
    • Punch card
    • Paper tape
      • Music roll
    • Music box cylinder or disk
  • Grooves (See also Audio Data)
    • Phonograph cylinder
    • Gramophone record
    • DictaBelt (groove on plastic belt)
    • Capacitance Electronic Disc
• Optics
  • Optical storage
• Thermodynamic

See also

• Human-readable
• MARC standards
• Machine-readable passport

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References

 This article incorporates public domain material from the General Services Administration document "Federal Standard 1037C".

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