2024-08-13 06:35:00
Par Jordan Frith, Clemson University
It was fifty years ago. The first modern barcode was scanned on a pack of 10 chewing gums at a grocery store in Troy, Ohio.
Fifty years is old for most technologies, but barcodes are still going strong. More than 10 billion are scanned every day around the world. And new types of barcode symbols, such as QR codeshave made it possible to multiply the uses of this technology.
I would have been like most people, no longer paying attention to these humble barcodes, if my research originally focused on the media had not taken some strange turns. I spent a year of my life digging through the archives and old newspaper articles to learn about the origins of the barcode and ultimately draw a book of cultural history. If the barcode did not lead to tattooing every human like an animal or announce the end of time, as some feared conspiracy theoristsit clearly marked the beginning of a new era in world trade.
An invention of the food industry
While the world has changed a lot since the mid-1970s, the Universal Product Code (UPC), which most people think of when they hear the word “barcode,” has remained the same. The code first scanned on a pack of gum on June 26, 1974, is basically identical to the billions of barcodes scanned in stores around the world today.
That first scan was the culmination of years of planning by the American food industry. In the late 1960s, labor costs were rising rapidly in grocery stores and inventory was becoming increasingly difficult to track. Industry executives hoped the bar code would help solve both problems, and they were right.
So in the early 1970s, the industry formed a committee to develop the UPC data standard and chose the IBM bar code symbol from a half a dozen other models. This standard and symbol are still in force.
According to the meeting notes I found in the archive funds George Goldberg of Stony Brook University, the people who developed the UPC system certainly felt they were doing important work. Little did they know that they were creating something that would long outlive them. The food industry’s optimistic estimates predicted that fewer than 10,000 businesses would ever use bar codes.
And so the digitization of the first UPC barcode received little attention at the time. A few newspapers published short articles about it, but they didn’t make it to the front page. The importance of barcodes only became apparent years laterwhen they became one of the most successful digital data infrastructures of all time.
A logistics revolution
Barcodes have not only changed the shopping experience at the checkout: they have also significantly improved inventory tracking. They make it easier to spot items that have sold well for quick restocking! They also save shelf space for each product. As écrit According to barcode expert Stephen A. Brown, these space savings have allowed for a rapid proliferation of new products. It’s thanks to barcodes that your grocery store can sell 15 types of toothpaste that are sometimes hard to tell apart. Similarly, today’s supermarkets probably wouldn’t exist without the massive amount of inventory data produced by barcode systems. As theaffirms otherwise Sanjay Sharma, professor at MIT:
“If barcodes had not been invented, the layout and architecture of commerce would have been entirely different.”
The modern barcode originated in the grocery industry, but it didn’t stay there for long. By the mid-1980s, the success of the UPC system had encouraged other industries to get involved. Within three years, Walmart, the Department of Defense, and the U.S. auto industry, for example, had begun using it to track supply chains. Private shipping companies also began using it to capture identification data. FedEx and UPS even created their own barcode symbols.
As has explain Sociologist Nigel Thrift said that by the late 1990s, barcodes had become “a crucial part of the story of the new way of understanding the world.” They contributed to a rapid globalization that would be hard to imagine if barcodes did not exist.
Behind the “boring” technologies
As a scholar who has been so interested in this story that he got the International Standard Book Number barcode from my latest book tattooed on his arm, the silent passing of the barcode’s 50th anniversary seems almost poetic to me. I grew up in a world where barcodes were ubiquitous. They were on every product I bought, every concert ticket I scanned, every package I received.
The author’s arm, tattooed with the barcode of his work.
Stevie Edwards
Like most people, I rarely thought about them, despite—or perhaps because of—their ubiquity. It wasn’t until I started researching my book that I realized how a barcode on a pack of gum had set off a chain of events that transformed the world.
For decades, barcodes have been a working tool that runs in the background of our lives. Modern humans scan them countless times a day, but we rarely think about them because they are not flashy and they simply work – most of the time, anyway. They remind us that seemingly boring technologies are often much more interesting and consequential than most people realize.
Jordan FrithPearce Professor of Professional Communication, Clemson University
This article is republished from The Conversation sous licence Creative Commons. Lire l’article original.
1723889466
#silent #anniversary #world #revolution
