Barcode Scanners Now an Integral Part of Modern Commerce
January 30, 2010
Go to any grocery store and pick up an item, turn it over, and you will see a barcode. 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. Barcodes got their start with the research initially done by Bernard Silver and Joseph Woodland in the late 1940s. 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 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.
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. 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.
In the mid 1970s the NAFC developed a standardized version of the barcode called the Universal Product Code (UPC). 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. By 1980, barcode scanner systems were being implemented by more than 8000 new stores per year.