Wednesday, October 7, 2009

57th anniversary of Bar Codes

It was on this day on October 7, 1952, Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver first invented the bar code. They were granted the first patent for their invention. The only difference between the bar code we know today and the one Woodland and Silver invented was that it was comprised of a series of concentric circles and not the 59 black-and-white vertical lines synonymous with the current design. This is the 57th anniversary of the first bar code patent.

In 1974, a scanner in a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, met the simple black-and-white striped bar code design tacked onto a 10-piece pack of Juicy fruit gum. Now, more than 10 billion bar codes are scanned in 25 industries and in places including airports, hospitals, and shipping centers.

A barcode is an optical machine-readable representation of data. Originally, barcodes represented data in the widths (lines) and the spacing’s of parallel lines, and was referred to as linear or 1 dimensional barcodes or symbologies. They also come in patterns of squares, dots, hexagons and other geometric patterns within images termed 2 dimensional matrix codes or symbologies. Although 2D systems use symbols other than bars, they are generally referred to as barcodes as well.

The first use of barcodes was to label railroad cars, but they were not commercially successful until they were used to automate supermarket checkout systems, a task in which they have become almost universal. Their use has spread too many other roles as well, tasks that are generically referred to as Auto ID Data Capture . Other systems are attempting to make inroads in the AIDC market, but the simplicity, universality and low cost of barcodes has limited the role of these other systems. It costs about half a United States cent (US$0.005) to implement a barcode while passive RFID still costs about $0.07 to $0.30 per tag.

Barcodes can be read by optical scanners called barcode readers, or scanned from an image by special software. Scanning software for 2D codes is built-in to or available for many mobile phones, and is especially popular in Japan, India, and Europe.

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