Everywhere you go, barcodes are there. From shopping to shipping, to transport, to our finances, our stock and information are constantly processed and recorded through an array of simple, parallel lines.
Barcodes now carry with them an unprecedented level of trust, but they only entered the popular consciousness in How, then, did people conduct business and shop safely before the barcode? Before the bar code, shops and businesses needed to count stock manually, with issues such as shoplifting being much more common than modern levels.
After the wilderness years of pre, where shopkeepers had to rely on stock counts and perceptive eyes, a punch card system was slowly adopted. These punch cards could only be used for simple arithmetic though. So, by the rise of the supermarkets in the s, they were found to be old-fashioned and obsolete.
Philco , a pioneer in television, radio and battery production, purchased it, making it the first barcode manufacturer. A few years later, that company sold it to RCA.
Long before Woodward devised a way to read barcodes, grocers knew they needed a way to keep track of the thousands of items coming in and going out of their shops daily. As stores grew larger, the problem of keeping track of inventory also got bigger. Punch cards, which were originally developed for the U.
Census, offered a glimmer of hope for grocers. These accomplishments were the culmination of three long years of work by the grocery industry to create a Universal Product Code UPC that eventually would turn into the modern-day Point of Sale POS systems.
After a trial period, the benefits of using this type of barcode system included:. To really get a feel for what the future holds for barcodes and barcode readers, you need to look at how far this technology has really come. This type of data collection technology actually dates back to the 19th century, when the concept of collecting information through a machine was first discussed. Other highlights in the brief history of barcodes and barcode scanners include:.
In , about 20 years after the initial barcode scanners were introduced, it became apparent you would have limitations using them. The most significant was that a barcode scanner could only read the 20 alphanumeric characters a barcode could hold. Denso Wave Inc. Called Quick Response QR codes, they can be scanned digitally, most commonly by a smartphone.
It is made up of four squares, with the first three larger ones acting as alignment targets, while the smaller square normalizes the angle and size of the shot. The encoded data is interpreted by one of the four primary modes, although other forms of information can also be shown if your scanner has the appropriate extensions:.
As its technology evolved, QR scanners became able to read more information, including up to pixels square that held about 1, characters. Today, similar to the purpose of barcodes, QR codes are scanned in just about every possible situation, including online ticketing, inventory tracking, logistics and shipping. You can find them on fliers from bands who want you to watch their concerts online. So what happened to Woodland and Silver?
Unfortunately, Bernard Silver died in , at the early age of thirty-eight. When the company started noticing all the attention RCA was getting with the Bulls-Eye Barcode, they remembered they had the inventor on their staff.
Woodland went on to play a major role in the development of the most popular and important barcode of the time — the UPC Universal Product Code. This proved to be the turning point for acceptance of barcodes in the grocery industry and that same pack of gum became so famous it now resides in the Smithsonian Institution!
The UPC solved not only the check-out needs, but also gave store owners a way to quickly monitor and maintain accurate inventory counts. Who would think a pack of gum could become so important? What is the Best Printing Technology for You?
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.
Generally speaking, you don't need to uniquely identify every box of cereal in a case or on a pallet. Regardless of the lack of serialized asset tracking, the benefits of barcode adoption in supermarkets were enormous:. Sadly, my independent supermarket did not adopt barcode technology.
Which meant that as a cashier, it was my job to manually key in the price of every item being purchased by the customer. I learned that manual data entry is both soul-sucking and prone to human error. For this reason, at TrackAbout, we strive to eliminate manual data entry whenever possible. A discussion of the history of barcodes would not be complete without discussing this weird chapter. In the year , U. The intent of the barcodes was to require readers to scan them in order to "learn more".
This all happened before the advent of the modern smartphone. The barcodes could only be read with a device called a :CueCat. Yes, that's a leading colon and yes, the device looks like a cat, and yes, they probably thought it was clever that a cat would be plugged into a PC next to a mouse.
There was a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem in that you couldn't read a proprietary barcode without a proprietary barcode scanner. Thus subscribers of the aforementioned publications woke up one day to find a :CueCat device in their mailbox.
Radio Shack gave away, for free, thousands of the devices at its retail stores just one of many reasons it cited for its eventual bankruptcy in Full disclosure, I own a couple of :CueCats. Wired sent me one and I picked up another free from RadioShack sorry if I contributed to your demise, old friend. I "neutered" the cats by following some instructions I found on the Internet to disable the proprietary encoders and turn them into generic barcode scanners.
No actual cats were harmed in this endeavor. Now, the fun part. Imagine you're relaxing on the weekend, chilling on the sofa, reading a magazine. For the sake of argument, we're going to have to assume you only read magazines within range of a PC.
What's this barcode next to this Coca-Cola ad? What more can I learn about this mysterious product? Let's find out. Get up and get over to the computer. Boot it up. This being circa, it takes a while. Log in.
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