Decades ago I had a friend that needed to scan his CD cover to start selling it online. I only had a Linux machine. So I looked up the documentation for the HP scanners, found it was well documented at the protocol level, so I bought one.

I wrote some CLI tool that could trigger a scan and read the data back, into a file. Worked well enough, but I wanted a GUI.

I started thinking I wanted to make a GUI for it. I started thinking "I'll need to do X like xv does, I'll need to do Y like xv does, I'll need to do Z like xv does..." Clearly, what I needed to do is extend xv so it could do scanning. I spent a weekend making the prototype, and it worked brilliantly.

xv was open source but licensed $25 for commercial use. I made a deal with the author, John Bradley to become a reseller for xv. Over the next few years I sold, I don't remember exactly, but maybe thousands of copies. To people, to government labs, to businesses large and small. It was the beginning of a company that I ran until around 7 years ago, and that just shuttered for good a few months ago, 25 years later.

All for program I wrote to scan a friend's album cover art.

https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4029