2024-08-08 14:53:03
That was fifty years ago. The first modern barcode was 10 packs of chewing gum at a grocery store in Troy, Ohio.
It may be fifty years old for most technologies, but the barcode is still going strong. 10 billion It is scanned every day around the world. New barcode symbologies, such as QR codes, increase the use of this technology.
If my initial media research hadn’t taken some strange turn, I would have probably stopped paying attention to these obscure barcodes, as most people do. I spent a year digging file and old newspaper articles to understand the origins of barcodes and eventually make one Book If barcodes don’t, as some fear, lead to everyone getting tattoos like animals or herald the end of an era, Conspiracy theoristsit marked the beginning of a new era in world trade.
Inventions of the food industry
While the world has changed a lot since the mid-1970s, the Universal Product Code (UPC) that most people think of when they hear the word “barcode” has remained the same. First scanned on a pack of gum on June 26, 1974, the code is essentially the same as the billions of bar codes scanned in stores around the world today.
That first scan was the culmination of years of planning by the U.S. food industry. By the late 1960s, grocery store labor costs were rising rapidly, and inventory was becoming increasingly difficult to track. Industry executives hoped bar codes would help them solve both problems, and they were right.
So, in the early 1970s, the industry formed a committee to develop the UPC data standard and selected the IBM bar code symbology over six other designs. The standard and symbol remain in effect.
Clyde Dawson/National Museum of American History
According to what I found in the meeting minutes Archives Fund George Goldberg of Stony Brook University, the developer of the UPC system, certainly felt they were doing important work. Little did they know, however, that they were creating something that would outlive them. Optimistic estimates from the food industry predicted that fewer than 10,000 companies would use bar codes.
As a result, the scanning of the first UPC barcode did not receive much attention at the time. Some newspapers published short articles on the subject, but they did not make the front page. The importance of barcodes became apparent A few years laterwhen they became one of the most successful digital data infrastructures ever.
Logistics Revolution
Barcodes have not only changed the checkout shopping experience: they have also greatly improved inventory tracking. They make it easier to spot best-selling items and restock them quickly! It also saves shelf space for each product. As already writing Barcode expert Stephen A. Brown says these space savings allow new products to become popular quickly. With barcodes, your grocery store can sell 15 different, sometimes indistinguishable varieties of toothpaste. Likewise, without the vast amounts of inventory data generated by barcode systems, today’s supermarkets might not exist.assertion Otherwise, says MIT professor Sanjay Sharma:
“If the barcode had not been invented, the layout and structure of business would be completely different. »
Modern barcoding was born in the grocery industry, but it’s not limited to that. The success of the UPC system in the mid-1980s encouraged other industries to take an interest in it. Within three years, for example, Walmart, the Department of Defense, and the U.S. auto industry were using it to track supply chains. Private shipping companies had also made moves to capture identity data. FedEx and UPS even created their own barcode symbologies.
As already explain Sociologist Nigel Thrift says that by the late 1990s bar codes had become “an essential part of a new way of understanding the world.” They contributed to a rapid globalization that would be unthinkable without bar codes.
Behind the “boring” technology
As a researcher, I was so intrigued by this story that I got the ISBN barcode from my latest book, Silent 50, tattooed on my arm.Egypt The anniversary of the barcode is almost poetic to me. I grew up in a world where barcodes were everywhere. They appeared on every product I bought, concert ticket I scanned, package I received.
Steve Edwards
Like most people, I rarely thought about them, despite—or perhaps because of—their ubiquity. It wasn’t until I began researching my book that I realized how a bar code on a pack of gum could set in motion a chain of events that changed the world.
Barcodes have been a working tool in our lives for decades. Modern humans glance at them countless times every day, but we rarely think about them because they’re not flashy and they just work – most of the time, anyway. They remind us that seemingly boring technology is often more interesting and important than most people realize.
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