Machine-readable medium and data

In telecommunications and computing a machine-readable medium (automated data medium) is a medium capable of storing data in a format readable by a mechanical device (rather than by a human).

Examples of machine-readable media include magnetic media such as magnetic disks, cards, tapes, and drums, punched cards and paper tapes, optical disks, barcodes and magnetic ink characters.

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

Common machine-readable data storage and transmission technologies include magnetic recording, 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
    • Punched 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
• Paper data storage

References

 This article incorporates public domain material from Federal Standard 1037C. General Services Administration. Archived from the original on 2022-01-22.