Commerce Has Been Revolutionized by Barcode Technology
Barcodes are small symbolic patterns that relay information about the identity of a product. For the most part, we now take this technology for granted, but barcode technology has become critical in the business world.
Early use of barcode scanners involved labeling railroad cars. But barcodes didn’t become part of our everyday life until they were adopted by supermarkets.|But the barcode’s true commercial niche was in automating supermarket checkout systems.}
Now, barcode scanning is implemented by the US Post Office, The Department of Defense, and just about every industrial application you can think of. In 1948 Bernard Silver began research into a system that could automatically read product information. Together with Joseph Woodland, the first workable system was developed using ultraviolet ink. Modifications to this system, developed by Woodland while he was at IBM were based on Morse Code.
The original dots and dashes of Morse Code were printed graphically on a piece of paper as narrow or wide vertical lines. The lines were read by shining a high intensity light through the paper onto an RCA935 photomultiplier tube. By 1949, pioneers Woodland and Silver applied for US Patent 2,612,994 called Classifying Apparatus and Method.
In 1952 RCA purchased the patent and began to develop the system further. Early tests were conducted on railroad cars in Boston, and then in 1967, the Associated American Railroads selected it as the standard used across the entire North American fleet. One year before that The National Association of Food Chains met to discuss the idea of using barcodes to automate checkout lines.
It was the Kroger chain who first volunteered to test the RCA system based on the bulls-eye code. In 1969 another company, Computer Identics installed test systems in a Michigan GM plant and a New Jersey warehousing company. These, among other initial financiers allowed barcode use to prove itself as viable in many different environments. But the most common use for this technology is in the grocery and retail industry. It helps businesses to improve trade efficiency and as a result, the economy as a whole.
The Universal Product Code (UPC) became the barcode standard in the mid 1970s. This was an 11 digit code to identify any product, and since then, industry has not been the same. Barcodes really came into their with the development of the standard 11 digit UPC. The acceptance of barcode technology was assured with these developments, and since the early 1980s it has become virtually universally used throughout business and government.
