A barcode birthday
Barcodes made their first appearance at the checkout in 1974, but the idea was patented way back in 1952. On 7th October 2012, the bar code enjoyed its sixtieth birthday. Is it close to retirement age?
Invented in the middle of the last century, the lasers and electronics needed to make bar codes into a consumer reality didn't exist at that time. The earliest use of them was to label railroad cars where the large size meant it would work with fairly simple optical detectors.
The very first supermarket scanning of an item took place in Ohio, 1974, when the bar code rang up the price of a packet of chewing gum. Today the bar code is found on pretty well anything stocked in a supermarket, but it took years for it to gain acceptance. In particular, wine producers refused to incorporate bar codes into their labels, claiming it was not aesthetically pleasing.
More than five million distinct barcodes are in use throughout the world, it is iconic, and US singer Pink (real name Alecia Moore), has a bar code tattoo on the nape of her neck.
With improvements in technology, we now also have the QR code, those square chessboards of dots which can be read by smartphones. These have proved much more popular in China and Japan than they have in Europe, but slowly people in the western hemisphere are realising new uses for them. Most rail stations now carry QR codes on their timetables, allowing people to quickly access the timetable for a particular route. Over in Gibraltar, where tourism is an important part of the economy, its tourist board is mounting QR codes at all the major tourist attractions so that visitors can instantly access an online version of a guide book to read about the building they are visiting.
Will the QR code eventually supplant the bar code? It is unlikely. The main purpose of bar codes is to allow high-speed identification of items for pricing and stock control. The main purpose of the QR codes is to act as a gateway to a media-rich environment. The bar code may be 60 years old, but it doesn't look like retiring any time soon.
25th October 2012
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.