Jason’s Fresh Produce

In the wayback time, scientists had to create punch cards to talk to computers. These cards would be physically spelled out machine code fed into a reader that would perform operations. Thankfully, we left behind this archaic system many decades ago.

I’m trying to bring it back.

But in a totally new way. I’m imagining a barcode or a tiny RFID chip embedded in something the size of a business card. You could make printable programs, and then have a piece of hardware on your computer, like a barcode reader or chip scanner, that would perform the actions read off the card.

For example, I hand you my new business card. It has an embedded script that tells your computer to go to the website www.LinkedIn.com and add Jason as a contact. When you get home, you wave the card in front of the reader and the script executes. Then you just sit back and wait to click “ok.”

Really, this is no different than handing someone a disk. It’s just smaller, sturdier, and more customizable graphically. It’s only intended to transfer really tiny bits of code, like a website or a simple set of instructions. Sure, I could just type in a webpage, but am I going to do that?

This may be totally useless, but I feel like there’s something here. I welcome comments on this idea.