THE BARCODE

WHAT IS IT?

The barcode is a numerical identification system adapted to be able to be read quickly by an optical-electric system. It's a simple and easy method to encode numeral or textual information, who can be read by electric readers. It let that every product can be found anywhere in the world, swiftly and without error possibilities (1 case in 3.000.000.000).

There are 2 types of barcodes:

-       1D: the information is stored horizontally using a combination of bars and spaces of different sizes. It is used for numerals or letters cods.

-       2D: the information is stored both horizontally and vertically. It has more advantages: dates are reduced to a single source, it has much more storage capacity and is almost invulnerable to sabotage.

HISOTRY

Modern barcode began in 1948. Bernard Silver, a graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, overheard the president of a local food chain asking to a scientific entrepreneur to develop a system to automatically read product information during checkout. Silver told his friend Norman Joseph Woodland, a teacher at Drexel of 27 years old, about the food chain president's request. 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. So, in 1949, they decided filed a patent application and 3 years later their patent was issued.

Bull's - eye barcode

In 1962 Silver died at age thirty-eight before having seen the commercial use of bar code. Woodland was awarded the 1992 National Medal of Technology by President Bush.

Barcode wasn't commercialized until 1966. The National Association of Food Chains (NAFC) put out a call to equipment manufacturers for systems that would speed the checkout process. In 1967 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. 

From those applications, they were developed a proposal for an industry-wide bar code system. The result was a Uniform Product Code. Three years later, the Committee recommended the adoption of this symbol (UPC), which today it uses in the USA. It was submitted by IBM and developed by George Laurer, whose work was an outgrowth of the idea of Woodland and Silver. Woodland was an employee at the time of IBM.