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Those Important
Inventions: The Story Behind the Barcode
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How did the barcode,
which changed the world's retail industry, come about?
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Now, barcodes are
commonplace and can be seen anytime, anywhere. It is estimated
that there are about 5 billion pieces of circulating goods in
the world that accept barcode scanning every day, and barcodes
have become an indispensable thing in people's daily life. |
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But little is known
about the origin of the barcode. |
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Barcodes first
appeared in the 1940s, but they were actually applied and
developed around the 1970s. Now all countries and regions in the
world have generally used bar code technology, and it is being
rapidly promoted to all parts of the world, its application
fields are becoming more and more extensive, and it has
gradually penetrated into many technical fields. |
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As early as the
1940s, two engineers from the United States, Joe Wood Land and
Berny Silver, began to study the codes composed of certain
patterns to represent the names of food sold in stores, and at
the same time developed corresponding equipment for
automatically recognizing such pattern codes. In 1949 Obtained a
U.S. patent. |
The pattern of this
pattern code is as follows: |
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This is the
so-called "bull's eye" barcode |
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The origin of the
barcode dates back to 1932, when a group of Harvard Business
School students started a project to make it easier for
customers to shop by catalog. |
The idea at the time
was that when a customer wants to buy something, all they need
to do is take a card from the store's catalog corresponding to
the product they want to buy, and then give this card to a
clerk, who will put the card into the mechanical card reader,
and then the card reader will output the information of the
product corresponding to the card. |
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Supermarket at that
time |
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Then the clerk can
obtain the information of the relevant product and its location
in the warehouse, so that the product required by the customer
can be shipped quickly, and the information on the card will
also update the store's inventory information, so that when the
store needs to purchase that item again, the store owner or
manager will know how much to order. |
This system has
great potential in tracking merchandise, making it easier to
manage and maintain inventory. |
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Unlike the commodity
barcodes we see today, the early barcode patterns resembled
miniature archery targets, resembling a series of concentric
circles of different widths, conceived by Bernard Silver, a
graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology, and called
"bull's eyes" code. |
In principle, the
"bull's eye" code is very similar to later barcodes. The "bull's
eye" barcode was originally intended to be used on merchandise
at the Food Fair store chain. When the Food Fair manager wanted
to find a better way to keep track of the store's inventory,
Silver overheard the news, then he devised a barcode solution
for use by some chain stores with large stocks of goods. |
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Working with
Drexel's graduate student colleague Normal Woodland on the
project, they eventually patented their new invention in 1949
and prepared it for commercial use.
Woodland and Silver applied for a patent for the barcode in
1949. |
Their solution is to
attach a barcode label to each food product to be sold, and then
use a scanner at the checkout counter to read the information
contained in each barcode. Each barcode has a different pattern,
and the pattern is for a particular item in a store is unique. |
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Early barcodes had
four white lines on a dark background. Depending on later needs,
more white lines could be added to increase the number of
product codes this barcode might represent. This is important
because as new products are invented and Production, the types
and quantities of commodities will increase. |
For the printing of
this barcode label, Woodland initially wanted to use a special
type of ink that would glow under ultraviolet light, but this
system had two disadvantages: first, printing the code was
expensive, and second, over time Will fade. |
If barcodes are to
be attached to products and remain on store shelves for extended
periods of time, longer-lasting carriers are required. |
As he refined his
new idea, Morse code inspired him to create a new type of
barcode. Morse code used dots and dashes, which Woodland
translated into thick and thin lines in the barcode. When the
barcode was perfected Later, he and Silver applied for a patent
for their invention, and called it "Classifying Apparatus and
Method". This new type of barcode is rectangular, can be printed
with ordinary ink, is less expensive, and has better error
tolerance. When part of the pattern of the barcode is worn away,
it can still be read by the scanner. |
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Neither Woodland nor
Silver made their fortunes from barcodes, as they sold the
patent to Philco, who later sold it to RCA (Radio Corporation of
America) in 1952, shortly after receiving the patent papers. |
But there is no
doubt that this invention is invaluable, because bar codes are
used in any country in the world where goods are sold, and all
that is required is a faster machine to scan items containing
bar codes. A little made possible by technologies that emerged
in the 1960s. |
Since then, people
have continued to improve the bar code system. Ten years later,
Joe Woodland, as an engineer at IBM, became the founder of the
North American Uniform Code UPC code. Several inventors,
represented by Girard Fessel, filed a patent in 1959 describing
that each of the numbers 0-9 could be composed of seven parallel
bars. But this code makes it difficult for machines to read, and
it is also inconvenient for people to read. However, this idea
did promote the emergence and development of barcodes. Soon,
E¡¤F¡¤B rinker applied for another patent, which is to mark the
bar code on the tram. A system invented by Sylvania in the 1960s
and adopted by the North American railroad system. These two
items can be said to be the earliest application of bar code
technology. |
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In 1970, the U.S.
Supermarket Ad Hoc Committee formulated the UPC code, and many
groups also proposed various bar code symbol schemes. The UPC
code was first tried in the grocery retail industry, which laid
the foundation for the unification and widespread adoption of
bar codes in the future. In the following year, Blasey Company
developed the Blasey Code and the corresponding automatic
identification system for inventory checking. This is the first
practical application of barcode technology in warehouse
management systems. In 1972, Monarch Marking and others
developed the Code Bar code, and the bar code technology in the
United States has entered a new stage of development. |
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In 1973, the United
States Uniform Code Consortium (UCC for short) established the
UPC barcode system and realized the standardization of the code
system. In the same year, the grocery industry adopted the UPC
code as the industry's general standard code system, which
played a positive role in promoting the wide application of
barcode technology in the field of commercial circulation and
sales. In 1974, Dr. Davide Allair of Inter Rmec developed code
39, which was quickly adopted by the U.S. Department of Defense
as a military barcode system. Code 39 is the first barcode that
combines letters and numbers, and was later widely used in the
industrial field. |
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In 1976, the
successful application of UPC codes in supermarkets in the
United States and Canada encouraged people, especially
Europeans, who were very interested in it. The following year,
the European Community formulated the European Article Code
EAN-13 and EAN-8 codes on the basis of the UPC-A code, signed
the "European Article Number" agreement memorandum, and formally
established the European Article Number Association (referred to
as EAN). In 1981, because EAN had developed into an
international organization, it was renamed "International
Article Numbering Association", referred to as IAN. However, due
to historical reasons and habits, it is still called EAN. (later
changed to EAN-international) |
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Japan began to
establish the POS system in 1974, researching standardization,
information input methods, printing technology, etc. And on the
basis of EAN, the Japanese article code JAN was formulated in
1978. In the same year, he joined the International Article
Numbering Association, began to register manufacturers, and
fully transferred to the development of barcode technology and
its series of products. Ten years later, he became the largest
user of EAN. |
Since the early
1980s, people have carried out a number of studies around
improving the information density of barcode symbols. Code 128
and Code 93 are the research results. Code 128 was recommended
in 1981, and Code 93 in 1982. The advantage of these two codes
is that the bar code symbol density is nearly 30% higher than
that of 39 codes. With the development of bar code technology,
the types of bar code system are increasing, so the
standardization problem is very prominent. For this reason, the
military standard 1189 has been formulated successively;
interleaved Code 25, Code 39 and CodeBar code ANSI standard
MH10.8M and so on. At the same time, some industries have also
begun to establish industry standards to meet the needs of
development. Since then, David Allier has developed Code 49,
which is a non-traditional bar code symbol, which has a higher
density than previous bar code symbols (that is, the prototype
of the two-dimensional bar code). Then Ted Williams (Ted
Williams) introduced the 16K code, which is a code system
suitable for laser scanning. By the end of 1990, there were more
than 40 kinds of bar code codes, and the corresponding automatic
identification equipment and printing technology have also been
greatly developed. |
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Attachment: |
The main events in
the development of barcode technology. |
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In 1949, |
N.J.Woodland of the
United States applied for a patent for circular bar codes. |
In 1960, |
The bar code
identification mark scheme used on railway freight cars was
proposed. |
In 1963, |
Articles describing
various bar code technologies are published in the October 1963
issue of Control Engineering. |
In 1967, |
A supermarket in
Cincinnati, USA first used a barcode scanner. |
In 1970, |
UCC was established
in the United States; the U.S. Postal Service used long and
short barcodes to indicate the postal codes of letters. |
In 1971, |
Some libraries in
Europe adopt Plessey codes. |
In 1972, |
The United States
proposed Codabar code, Cross 25 code and UPC code. |
In 1974, |
The United States
proposed Code 39. |
In 1977, |
Europe adopted the
EAN code. |
In 1980, |
The U.S. military
department adopted Code 39 as its item code. |
In 1981, |
The International
Article Numbering Association was established; the barcode
decoding technology for automatic identification was realized;
Code 128 were recommended. |
In 1982, |
The handheld laser
barcode scanner was practical; the US military standard 1189 was
adopted; 93 codes began to be used. |
In 1983, |
The United States
formulated the ANSI standard MH10.8M, including Cross 25 code,
Code 39 and Codebar code. |
In 1984, |
The United States
formulated the bar code standard for the healthcare industry. |
In 1987, |
Dr. David Allairs of
the United States proposed Code 49. |
In 1988, |
The visible laser
diode was successfully developed; Ted Williams of the United
States proposed a novel code system 16K code suitable for laser
system reading. |
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The lengthy process of barcode being applied |
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The Development of Modern
Barcode Technology |
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CONTACT |
autobaup@aol.com cs@easiersoft.com |
If you have any question, please
feel free to email us,
we will reply as soon as
possible. |
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554420014 |
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