Evolution of Bar Code

The history of the Bar Code can be traced to the supermarkets, which gained popularity in the U.S. supermarkets were required to stock thousands of products of different brands. The enormous task of keeping close track and maintaining the inventories, which were to be neither too large nor too small, that was of prime importance for the supermarket to be efficient and profitable. The manual method of counting each and every item was painfully slow and time consuming. This expensive and cumbersome job had to be done at scene long before bar codes and scanners were invented.

In 1948, Bernard Silver, a graduate student at Philadelphia`s Drexel Institute of Technology and Norman Joseph Woodland, a twenty seven years old graduate and teacher at the same institute, worked on the idea of speeding up transactions at the supermarkets by automatic capture of product information at the checkout counters. In 1952, Woodland and Silver built a reading device that was the size of a desk and had to be wrapped in black oil cloth to keep out the ambient light. This device relied on two key elements:

1. A five hundred watt (500W) incandescent bulb as the light source, and

2.  An RCA 935 photo- multiplier tube, designed for movie sound systems, as the reader.

Although the System was unusually large and cumbersome to operate, it worked. The invention of the transistor in 1950s helped the electronic industry in producing compact and more powerful electronic components and circuits. Till 1960, the idea of automated checkout in the food chain industry existed only at the conceptual level. It was only in 1967 that a pilot project system was installed in a Kroger Store in Cincinnati. In 1969, the National Association of Food Chains (NAFC) approached Logicon to develop a proposed universal coding system. By 1970, Part I and Part II of the Universal Grocery Products Identification Code (UGPIC) was formulated. Based on the recommendations of the Logicon report, the U.S. Supermarket Adhoc Committee on Universal Product Coding was formed, resulting in this committee recommending the adopting of the Universal Product Code (UPC) in 1973. By June 1974, the first scanner capture of reading the Universal Product Code was installed at Mash`s Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. The scanning system was built by NCR and used a Spectra Physics laser scanner. By 1980s more than 90 per cent of all grocery items carried UPC codes.

Before the UPC was adopted, many systems were used in stores, libraries, factories, etc. each with their own proprietary codes. When the UPC took over, Standardisation helped the industry by making it easy for the manufactures as well as the users. All the companies had to register with the Universal Code Council (UCC) identifier code numbers for their company who could then register each of their products.

As technologies grow, these automatic identification system technologies are providing much effective solutions today.