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Shasta542:
Happy 11th birthday to Goog11e!
Sheriff Roland:
Gandhi
Fran:
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948)
Fran:
57th Anniversary of the Invention of the Bar Code
http://www.adams1.com/history.html
A Short History of Bar Code
In 1932 an ambitious project was conducted by a small group of students headed by Wallace Flint at the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration. The project proposed that customers select desired merchandise from a catalog by removing corresponding punched cards from the catalog. These punched cards were then handed to a checker who placed the cards into a reader. The system then pulled the merchandise automatically from the storeroom and delivered it to the checkout counter. A complete customer bill was produced and inventory records were updated.
Modern bar code began in 1948. Bernard Silver, a graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, overheard the president of a local food chain asking one of the deans to undertake research to develop a system to automatically read product information during checkout. Silver told his friend Norman Joseph Woodland about the food chain president's request. Woodland was a twenty seven year old graduate student and teacher at Drexel. The problem fascinated Woodland and he began to work on the problem.
Woodland's first idea used patterns of ink that would glow under ultraviolet light. Woodland and Silver built a device which worked, but the system had problems with ink instability and it was expensive to print the patterns. Woodland was still convinced they had a workable idea. Woodland took some stock market earnings, quit his teaching job at Drexel, and moved to his grandfather's Florida apartment to have more time to work on the problem.
On October 20, 1949, Woodland and Silver filed a patent application titled "Classifying Apparatus and Method." The inventors described their invention as relating "to the art of article classification...through the medium of identifying patterns".
Most bar code histories state that the Woodland and Silver bar code was a "bull's eye" symbol, a symbol made up of a series of concentric circles. While Woodland and Silver did describe such a symbol, the basic symbology was described as a straight line pattern quite similar to present day linear bar codes like UPC and Code 39.
The symbology was made up of a pattern of four white lines on a dark background. The first line was a datum line and the positions of the remaining three lines were fixed with respect to the first line. The information was coded by the presence or absence of one or more of the lines. This allowed 7 different classifications of articles. However, the inventors noted that if more lines were added, more classifications could be coded. With 10 lines, 1023 classifications could be coded.
The Woodland and Silver patent application was issued October 7, 1952 as US Patent 2,612,994.
In 1962 Silver died at age thirty-eight (in an automobile accident) before having seen the commercial use of bar code. Woodland was awarded the 1992 National Medal of Technology by President George Herbert Walker Bush. Neither Silver nor Woodland made much money on the idea that started a billion dollar business. That was because they sold the patent to RCA in 1952 for a small sum of money, long before any commericalization of the technology. The patent expired in 1969, 5 years before the first industry wide use of barcode in grocery stores. It was an invention ahead of its time.
The National Association of Food Chains (NAFC) put out a call to equipment manufacturers for systems that would speed the checkout process. In 1967 RCA installed one of the first scanning systems at a Kroger store in Cincinnati. The product codes were represented by "bull's-eye barcodes", a set of concentric circular bars and spaces of varying widths. These barcodes were not pre-printed on the item's packaging, but were labels that were put on the items by Kroger employees. But there was problems with the RCA/Kroger code. It was recognized that the industry would have to agree on a standard coding scheme open to all equipment manufacturers in order to getl food producers and dealers to adopt the technology.
In 1969, the NAFC asked Logicon, Inc. to develop a proposal for an industry-wide bar code system. The result was Parts 1 and 2 of the Universal Grocery Products Identification Code (UGPIC) in the summer of 1970. Based on the recommendations of the Logicon report, the U.S. Supermarket Ad Hoc Committee on a Uniform Grocery Product Code was formed. Three years later, the Committee recommended the adoption of the UPC symbol set still used in the USA today. It was submitted by IBM and developed by George Laurer (see the history at his web site), whose work was an outgrowth of the idea of Woodland and Silver. Woodland was an IBM employee at the time.
In June 1974, one of the first UPC scanner, made by NCR Corp. (which was then called National Cash Register Co), was installed at Marsh's supermarket in Troy, Ohio. On June 26, 1974, the first product with a bar code was scanned at a check-out counter. It was a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum. The pack of gum wasn't specially designated to be the first scanned product. It just happened to be the first item lifted from the cart by a shopper whose name is long since lost to history. Today, the pack of gum is on display at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.
Shasta542:
--- Quote from: Fran on October 07, 2009, 01:30:14 am ---
--- End quote ---
I see the "L", but I can't find the other letters. :P 8) ::) :D
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