A widget that uses a roll of fax paper and a crank or motor to permanently archive jottings. Clean paper is unrolled from the bottom roll through a window, which exposes a flat area for writing. The paper can be advanced to a clean region by winding the written area onto a take-up spool at the top, thus permanently archiving all those telephone numbers you didn't think worth entering into your Palm but now need again anyway. Using cash-register rolls makes a smaller, semi-portable widget.

Because this is way too primitive for the technoweenies, can be enhanced electronically as follows:

o A motorized winder and pressure-sensitive writing pad; press a button and exactly enough paper is scrolled to make a clean page.

o An automatic timestamp that prints the date and the time on the margin whenever something is written.

o A "Cross Pad" like underpad that will capture digital ink (with timestamps) so you can upload / archive /fax, or print out post-its of the current (or past) page. Alternatively, a scanner at the top scans the image as it scrolls onto the takeup reel.
-- rmutt, May 04 2000

The issue is search. How do you find that telephone number, now that it's buried by months of other random scribbles?
-- egnor, May 04 2000


You just scroll back until you find it. Much easier than my current system of examining every post-it on every layer of my desk in hopes that I haven't trashed it yet.
-- rmutt, May 04 2000


<grin> Ought to call it 'Poor man's palmtop'...
-- StarChaser, May 05 2000


Related things, organized as bullet points:

o Jack Kerouac is supposed to have written On The Road on huge loops of typewriter paper to avoid stopping to change sheets.

o I was in Rome a little while ago, and one of the church's Jubilee Year things (I was not there as a pilgrim, but did have to fight them for places to stay) was a mile-long roll of paper very much like this but on a larger scale -- a flat area with huge spools on both ends. You were expected to write things on the exposed paper, and eventually someone would wind it a little to expose fresh whitespace, and so on. The idea was to tour it around the world along with an eye-haemorrhagingly ugly twelve-foot 'Crystal Cross' apparently made with those little glass cubes that they use as translucent bricks in community swimming pools and orthodontist's offices. (Both of these gimcracky eyesores were in the middle of S. Maria degli Angeli at the time, a building which Diocletian and Michelangelo had both tried to make look nice at various times). I guess that last note's not relevant, I just saw an opportunity to complain and seized it. You would have done the same.
-- Monkfish, Nov 21 2000


maybe you could still have 8.5 x 11 rip-off sections, with a 3-hole punch. it would be a nice feature, as long as you tried not to think toilet paper
-- dingbats247, Aug 24 2002


Some busses and trains have their destination boards made out of rolling rexin belt.
-- concept, Jun 08 2003


Figure out a way to rip off small sheets *without destroying the infinite loop*, and you've got yourself a croissant.

(Maybe periodically there should be a small sheet of paper sticking out with only one side attached: thus this widget could double as an infinite and finite-removable notepad.)
-- phundug, Jun 08 2003



random, halfbakery