TWAIN

TWAIN is the interface that made scanners interchangeable. Instead of every program writing its own code for every scanner model, a group of makers — among them Hewlett-Packard, Kodak, Logitech and Aldus — introduced a common standard in 1992 in which the application requests an image and the scanner's TWAIN driver delivers it, usually through the vendor's own settings dialog.

The name is officially not an acronym, but the joke Technology Without An Interesting Name stuck. TWAIN dominated on Windows and Mac; in the Unix world SANE plays the equivalent role, and later Apple's Image Capture. The standard has aged but endures, because the installed base of scanners and multifunction printers makes it hard to shake off.