The business with Bundled software: TWAIN

What is TWAIN?
Before we get into the nitty gritty of what TWAIN scan software can do for you , here’s an interesting tit-bit about the name. Contrary to popular belief, TWAIN is not an acronym, but a backcronym. It is inspired by a Rudyard Kipling poem “The Ballad of East and West” from the line: …and never the twain shall meet. A line reflecting the difficulty, back in the early 90’s, of connecting scanners and personal computers. This frustrating issue, that us boomers know all about, inspired the developers to build a program that lets you not only connect your scanner to you computer without all the glitches (remember installing drivers over and over again?). It also enables your scan software to communicate with applications on your computer. The fact that the branding presents the word in uppercase, made people believe it is an acronym. The company decided to let the people decide what it should stand for if it was an acronym and the winner was Technology Without An Interesting Name. And that’s how TWAIN became a backcronym.


TWAIN is a widely-used program that lets you scan an image (using a scanner ) directly into the application (eg: PhotoShop, your word processor, mail application) where you want to work with the image. Without TWAIN, you would have to close an application that was open, open a special application to receive the image, and then move the image to the application where you wanted to work with it. The TWAIN driver runs between an application and the scanner hardware. TWAIN usually comes as part of the software package you get when you buy a scanner. It's also integrated into PhotoShop and similar image manipulation programs.

The software was developed by a work group from major scanner manufacturers and scanning software developers and is now an industry standard.