The humble barcode started life on supermarket products in 1974 when The Wrigley Company put the first barcodes on packs of chewing gum. Increasingly they are more relevant in our everyday life; at the self-service checkout or using a QR code in a magazine. No longer are barcodes only “zapped” by the checkout operator or the librarian.
Barcoding has been around for some other applications pre-dating this, including in 1959 when a system known as KarTrak could read the serial number of railway trucks as they went past a fixed scanner, using blue and yellow reflective stripes. David Collins developed this system in Pennsylvania and is regarded as barcoding’s inventor.
However, for the barcode to have widespread adoption there needed to be a set of standards that gave each product type its own unique code. This came about in the form of UPC (Universal Product Standard), which was developed in the early 1970s and made its debut with the gum.
Supermarkets were quick to adopt the standard as it solved one of the big issues of the time - where shoplifters were changing product price labels. In the United States Christian Groups protested against the rollout of the barcode standard, as they thought it contained the satanic number of 666.
The UPC standards were revised to include extra information about the product, for example a catch weight if dealing with different cuts of meat at differing prices.
The translation of numbers and letters to those black bars is known in the trade as a ‘symbology’. Barcodes started life like Morse code where a specific set of black and white lines represented an individual number (the Code 39 standard). These codes have the advantage that you can easily generate them on a computer using a barcode font. The downside is that to store anything other than a short number would lead to an impractically long label. Standards have improved with clever encoding so that more text could be represented in a smaller space. Widely used today is the Code 128 standard, which performs all sorts of tricks to encode text. It is still common practice to include something that a human can read under the bars.
Increasingly we’re seeing more use of 2D barcodes (i.e. the ones that aren’t just a set of bars). These allow for storage of much more data like a website address or contact information. We are seeing these appear on billboards, magazines and, much to my horror, on the M11 last week where I followed a lorry with one on the back (I didn’t attempt to scan it, I should say). Mobile phone cameras make it convenient to use these codes in everyday life.
So, next time you place your item in the bagging area, give thanks to the technology that makes this a fast and reliable experience for you (well most of the time). -
No comments yet