TWAIN (Not Mark)

Last night I attended the Boca Raton Computer Society, Inc. (BRCS) Hardware / Software SIG. (http://brcs.org/)

One of questions, related to scanners, was: Can someone explain what TWAIN is?

There was no internet access during the SIG, so it could not be looked up. There was a lot of speculation, the consensus being it is a machine language, used to communicate between a scanner and the PC.

I ran a Google Advanced search: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&as_q=what+is+twain+-mark&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=mark&num=10&lr=&as_filetype=&ft=i&as_sitesearch=.com&as_qdr=all&as_rights=&as_occt=any&cr=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&safe=active

Here are some of the results that made some sort of sense to me:

http://www.worldstart.com/tips/tips.php/1209

http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/glossary/f/twain.htm


http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci213232,00.html

I also found the following through Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWAIN; they are a little more technical:

http://www.dosadi.com/twain1.htm

http://www.twain.org/

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I hope this helps anyone needing more knowledge about TWAIN.

If you know of any other information, that may help in understanding TWAIN and what it does, please leave a comment with a link below.