The TWAIN initiative was originally launched in 1992 by leading industry vendors who recognized a need for a standard interface between the image handling software and hardware. Today the TWAIN standard, including the specification, data source manager and sample code, are maintained by the TWAIN Working Group.
The TWAIN Working Group is a not-for-profit organization which represents the imaging industry. TWAIN's purpose is to provide and foster a universal public standard which links applications and image acquisition devices. The ongoing mission of the organization is to continue to enhance the standard to accommodate future technologies. The latest released version of the TWAIN standard is 1.9 while 2.0 is going to be released soon.
TWAIN is a standard softwareprotocol and applications programming interface (API) that regulates communication between software applications and imaging devices such as scanners and digital cameras. The word TWAIN is from Rudyard Kipling's "The Ballad of East and West" — "...and never the twain shall meet..." — reflecting the difficulty at the time of connecting scanners and personal computers. It was up-cased to TWAIN to make it more distinctive. The word TWAIN is not an official acronym; however, it is widely known as "Technology Without An Interesting Name." The official website notes that "[this name] seems to haunt the standard."[1]
