Notwithstanding its inauspicious beginning, the bar code has become a remarkable success, a workhorse in many and varied applications. One of the first successful bar codes, Code 39 developed by Dr. David Allais, is widely used in logistical and defense applications. Code 39 is still in use today, although it is less sophisticated than some of the newer bar codes. Code and Interleaved 2 of 5 are other codes that attained some success in niche markets. Today, bar codes are everywhere.
Rental car companies keep track of their fleet by means of bar codes on the car bumper. Airlines track passenger luggage, reducing the chance of loss believe it or not. NASA relies on bar codes to monitor the thousands of heat tiles that need to be replaced after every space shuttle trip, and the movement of nuclear waste is tracked with a bar-code inventory system.
Bar codes even appear on humans! Fashion designers stamp bar codes on their models to help coordinate fashion shows. The codes store information about what outfits each model should be wearing and when they are due on the runway. The best-known and most widespread use of bar codes has been on consumer products. The Universal Product Code, or U. Most technological innovations are first invented and then a need is found for the invention. The U. Believing that automating the grocery checkout process could reduce labor costs, improve inventory control, speed up the process, and improve customer service, six industry associations, representing both product manufacturers and supermarkets, created an industry wide committee of industry leaders.
Their two-year effort resulted in the announcement of the Universal Product Code and the U. Laurer is considered the inventor of U. In June of , the first U. Discover how you can deliver greater ROI on an accelerated timeline by partnering with Barcodes, Inc. When Were Barcodes Invented? Shop Barcode Scanners. Get Expert Help. Barcodes could only be read in one direction. By contrast, lasers could be directed using motorized, moving mirrors which enabled scanning barcodes rapidly from a wide variety of angles.
It was a major improvement in speed, accuracy and reliability. It allowed the scanner to read partially-damaged labels because the moving laser would eventually scan the undamaged areas.
This new laser-based barcode system found a happy home in a General Motors manufacturing plant in Pontiac, Michigan. It was successfully used to track the manufacture of car axles. This victory propelled the nascent technology forward and cemented Computer Identics' place in the industrial history books. Barcodes for supermarkets remained a holy grail of sorts due to the potential for huge productivity gains. RCA had purchased the original barcode patent, but ultimately, IBM who didn't have the patent but did have Norman Woodland, the original inventor ultimately won the race with the invention of the linear UPC barcode more on UPC in the next section.
Bullseye barcodes would sometimes smear in the direction the paper stock was running through the printer, whereas UPC barcodes being just vertical lines did not. That was the clincher. The invention of the UPC barcode, the falling cost of lasers and the rise of the integrated circuit all coincided to enable the most significant achievement in logistics in the millennium -- buying a pack of gum.
The pack of gum and receipt are now in the Smithsonian Museum. In , I was a high school freshman working part-time in an independent supermarket. My job "interview" consisted of me climbing onto the deli counter and scrubbing the grit off freshly-grouted wall tiles. You're hired. This supermarket was a gut rehab, rising like a capitalistic phoenix from the ashes of the failed Shop-Rite that came before it.
The job provided upward mobility as I worked my way up from tile-scrubber to bagger to stock boy to cashier, before eventually leaving for college.
To the delight of cashiers everywhere, many supermarkets in the US in the s adopted barcode scanning technology. The Universal Product Code UPC symbol was the barcode of choice, and today can be found on nearly every manufactured retail item.
The barcode shown above translates to, "General Mills" the manufacturer and "oz Family Size box of Cheerios" the product code. Point of fact -- 21 ounces of Cheerios does not feed a family for very long. If you pick up five boxes of Cheerios of the same size and package design, they will all have the exact same UPC number. Therefore, in the supermarket anyway, UPC barcodes are not unique tracking numbers.
They are essentially a part number. UPC codes can encode a maximum of 11 numeric digits 0 through 9 plus a 12th trailing checksum. The checksum is the result of an algorithm or function applied to the other numbers and is used to ensure accuracy in scanning.
UPC supports no letters and no special characters like punctuation. This limits the range of numbers you can encode to whatever you can cram into 11 digits 0 through 99,,, These facts make UPC codes a poor choice for use in serialized, physical asset tracking systems.
Another lesson UPC teaches us is that unique, serialized ID tracking of one-way, consumable products is generally overkill. But, as Maiman wrote, "I did not foresee the supermarket check-out scanner or the printer. A booklet produced in by the Kroger Company, which ran one of the largest supermarket chains in North America, signed off with a despairing wish for a better future: "Just dreaming a little.
Faster service, more productive service is needed desperately. We solicit your help. A small research team at the powerful Radio Corporation of America RCA was looking at a few new projects, including the possibility of an automatic bank cash machine, which they decided would not go because "the customer would not buy the concept.
A search of the history turned up some apparently hare-brained schemes: in one, customers picked out punch cards that identified what they wanted to buy and presented them to a cashier, who retrieved the goods from a store. This did not survive long in the grocery business. Then there was the patent for a system in which the supermarket shopper threw everything into a basket, which was pushed under a scanner that identified each item and printed out a bill. They soon found the Woodland and Silver patent.
This was not the rectangular bar code that Woodland had first envisaged on Miami Beach but the "bull's-eye" of concentric circles he thought would be a better design. When he and Silver worked on it, they decided the bull's-eye was the better symbol because it could be read accurately from any angle.
Printing the bull's-eye bar code proved to be one of the greatest difficulties, because any imperfections would make the whole system unworkable. A rotating turret of ballpoint pens, and a pen designed for astronauts that could write upside down, solved some of the problems. All this technical development, involving several companies commissioned by RCA, was to lead up to the first real-life test at the Kroger Kenwood Plaza store in Cincinnati.
More checkstands were installed and a comparison with other Kroger stores told an undeniable and very promising story: the bull's-eye bar code hit the target, with superior sales figures.
But this was just one store in a nationwide grocery and supermarket business worth billions. If the laser and bar code were to revolutionize the checkout counter, they would have to be near universal.
The representatives of the grocery trade were charged with finding a way to introduce a Universal Product Code, a bar code of some description that would be common to all goods sold in supermarkets and imprinted by the manufacturers and retailers.
The code would carry information about the nature of the product, the company that made it, and so on. In-store computers would "read" this information with scanners and introduce their own variations, which might involve special offers and reductions. The vision was there but the difficulties in the way of its realization were daunting. Manufacturers were often resistant to the idea of a universal code. They had existing methods of identification of products, which would have to be discarded or adapted.
Cardboard manufacturers worried that a printed code might spoil their product. Canners did not want to be obliged to put bar codes on the base of cans.
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