ON THE CUTTING EDGE: Bar Code Is 35 YO
The New York Times marks the 35th anniversary of the first commercial use of the bar code, which was invented by IBM engineers:
The design was straightforward - 59 black and white bars. And the inventors’ objectives were simple enough, too - to speed up the grocery checkout line and give supermarkets a new tool to track their stock.
But the bar code has become much more than that since it was first used to read the price on a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit gum (67 cents) on the morning of June 26, 1974. Now they are used to board airplanes and track packages. Bar codes help people with diabetes calibrate glucose meters and researchers study the pollination habits of bees. They inspired a hand-held video game, Barcode Battler, in 1991.
Today, bar codes are scanned more than 10 billion times a day around the world. And after 35 years, they are both the mundane minutiae of modern life and cultural icons of cold efficiency, identification and control.
But for all its ubiquity, the barcode may give way to such newer technologies as radio frequency identification (RFID) - if the cost differential shrinks: Bar codes cost 0.5 cents each, while electronic RFID tags cost more than 100 times as much.
BTW, neither IBM nor the team that developed the bar code filed a patent for the invention.
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