A History Of The Barcode And Barcode Scanners

A History Of The Barcode And Barcode Scanners

Have you ever wondered how long barcode scanners have been in use for in major retail shops? For many people, this is the only means of security and accurately storing information about the product. Those many of the younger generation will not know that this system has only been around the seventies, even though the barcode did not pick up properly until the eighties.

Prior to barcodes and barcode scanners (also known as barcode readers), there were no real monitoring system, stock counting and monitoring were completed manually. This was a time consuming and laborious task, often leading to miscounts and guesswork on the stocktaking. It is hard to believe that barcodes were not in use until nearly forty years ago, as this is now an essential part of our modern life. This begs to raise the question of, how did we function without barcodes?

Before the notion of automating the grocery checkout point, there were no such thing as a scanner or electrical device to read the product code. In fact, there were no real system of buying for a long time, therefore grocery shops and shop owners were at risk from theft and burglary. The only way to prevent this was physically count each product one by one, recording down on paper how many of the products were left and correlating how many had been sold against the takings.

As grocery stores were expanding and more products were being stocked it became vital that an accurate inventory was completed, which was difficult to do without a sound system. The idea for an automated system was presented to a group of ambitious students in 1932. Based at Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration, the group headed by Wallace Flint began a project to automate the grocery checkout system and their inventory system.

The group came up with a system whereby shoppers would select their items from a catalogue, which corresponding to the product in the catalogue were tickets that they could tear out. These tickets were punch cards, which they would then hand to the cashier upon purchasing the items. The cashiers would then insert this into a reader, to which the product is then pulled out from the storeroom and delivered to the counter. A customer receipt and an easier system for updating the inventory records would follow this.

The system was a step into the right direction, however this saw problems as the reader was expensive to build and run. It was not until a student, Bernie Silver, at Drexel Institute in Philadelphia, overheard a conversation about automating a data collection system. Silver relayed this information to his colleague and fellow teacher, Norman Woodland, who upon hearing this spent the next two years working on a device.

The first barcode that Woodland had come up with based on Morse code, stretching the lines vertically. This was then converted into circles, which

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