Datalinx Blog

Now, many people have written about the history of barcodes and you may have noticed that on 7 October 2009 Google celebrated the 57th Anniversary of the date the 1st patent was taken out against a barcode (and yes the barcode did scan and display the word GOOGLE)!

If you google barcode history you will find a huge amount of in depth detail about barcodes, however, here's Betty's Barcode History in a Nutshell...

The idea of creating a code that could be tracked in an automated manner was first explored in 1932. A group of students, headed by Wallace Flint, at the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration explored a project that proposed using punched cards to select products from a catalogue that would then be provided to the shopper. Over the years various people explored and tried to develop this idea but it was a case of the idea being ahead of affordable and available technology.

The first barcode design to be patented was the bulls eye barcode (in 1949), which was created as a set of concentric circles that could be scanned in any direction.

It was the 1960’s before barcoding really made an impact on society, which was when it was developed to track railroad cars across the USA. However, even this was considered too expensive at the time to be put in practise in a fully commercial format.

In the 70’s barcoding moved forward a giant leap when a Marsh’s supermarket in the USA had the first U.P.C scanner installed. The bit of trivia that everyone remembers is that the first product scanned by this new scanner was a packet of Wrigley’s Gum!

However it wasn’t until the 1980’s that technology caught up with the barcode. It was during this period that the Department of Defense in the USA started to use Code 39 to mark all goods sold to their military. 30 years on and the USA Military are still using the LOGMARS system with code 39 symbology.

If you want to find out more, just google barcode history and have a read. At my last count there were over 3.7 million entries!

A lot of people tend to make a barcode seem more complicated than it actually is. I've always considered that a barcode is a string of characters that are machine readable.
 
The most common barcodes, and the type that we all see when we do our shopping (remind me to tell you about my retail therapy course some time ;-) ) is known technically as linear or 1D codes typically representing up to 20 characters per code. Whilst there is no reason why a linear barcode should not encode more characters than this, I am told by my technical colleagues at Datalinx, that more than this and the size of the printable code starts to becomes too big or the thinness of the lines within the code becomes too small.

Having been around for a few years (a lady never tells you her age) and not living in a cave. I have to admit that barcodes are everywhere and not just on the food you buy in the supermarket (although that’s the place you usually notice them).
Putting a barcode on an item means it can easily be tracked and counted. Usually this is part of an automation process. The automation bit ensures that the data from the barcode is captured quickly and accurately allowing a business to be more efficient.