Barcode Technology Has Rocked Modern Commerce

Barcodes are small symbolic patterns that relay information about the identity of a product. We tend not to notice how pervasive barcodes have become, but it was not always that way.

The first used of early barcode technology was for keeping track of 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. While working at IBM Woodland developed a system based on extending Morse Code in a graphical manner.

What Woodland and his team did was to extend the dots and dashes of the code into narrow or wide vertical lines capable of being interpreted by a reader. The paper would then be passed in front of a photo cell and a bright light would be shone through the paper. Later, a bulls-eye pattern was used so that scanning would work in either direction.

At first, barcode scanning was unreliable and expensive as it required investments from large corporations willing to test the technology’s potential. 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.

Finally the Kroger chain of stores agreed to test a barcode system developed by RCA. And by 1969, Computer Identics; a company formed by David Collins of the Pennsylvania Railroad, installed the first two systems at General Motors in Pontiac, Michigan and The General Trading Company in Carlstadt, New Jersey. These, among other initial financiers allowed barcode use to prove itself as viable in many different environments. However, almost from the beginning the most common application of the technology was in large retail situations such as grocery stores. 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.

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