Posted on 10/08/2010 8:05:33 AM PDT by Vigilanteman
This week marks the 58th anniversary of the invention of the bar code. Granted to American inventors Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver three years after it was filed, patent number 2,612,994 (click here to view patent) was for a pattern of concentric circles, rather than the set of straight lines used today.
Their research began in 1948 after Mr. Silver, a graduate student at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, overheard a local food chain boss asking one of the institute's deans to design a system for reading product data automatically.
Mr. Woodland, a fellow graduate student and teacher at Drexel, and Mr. Silver first tried using patterns of ink that glowed under ultraviolet light, but it proved unreliable and too expensive.
Mr. Woodland then came up with the linear bar code, and later replaced the lines with circles so that they could be scanned from an angle. The pair patented their "bull's eye" design the next year.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
What is the bar code?
At closing time they are all 10’s?
Aren’t they the devil’s mark?
Back in the 1980s is when the scanners really took hold in retail business, and I was working briefly for a supermarket here in Pittsburgh.
As an employee, I was duly enrolled as a member of the UFCW, which took quite a chunk of my pay for initiation and dues.
But in exchange, I did get the newsletter that railed constantly about how in spite of scanners, it was essential that each can of peas be labeled with the price and how the new procedures were going to be the destruction of thousands of jobs in retail.
You know, just last night I was thumbing through my new Guns & Ammo and came across an ad for a company that had one of those codes in it. The ad said to scan with your smart phone. Cool way to get folks to your site. I can't remember the company off-hand.
I was an odd bird as a child, and I actually took to trying to understand how bar codes work. I would sit in math class (after my work was done, of course) and use a straightedge to create bar codes based on what I read and understood. I would take those made up bar codes and scan them on the machines at work to see if I did anything right.
Surprisingly, I became very efficient at numerics, but the letters were complicated. If I recall correctly (it’s been a while), the bar code system is based off of an OCR modality that uses check digits to scan and validate input.
Without handheld scanners today, my job would suck. I’m very happy that the bar code exists.
Aren’t the first, middle and last lines supposed to be 6’s (666)?
LOL. Very good. And yes, I guess I am a geek.
The UFCW Luddites used a lot of our dues to try and push an initiative banning non returnable cans and beverage bottles. They said it would create a lot more jobs.
We tried to get them to limit it to bottles as cans were never much of a problem: People brought in cans all the time for the penny or so per can they would get for recycling weight.
Bottles, OTOH, were a real pain. Bottles with cracks and chips were worthless as far as deposits went. In those days, you actually got kids with initiative who would pick up bottles at the side of the road to bring in to earn deposit money-- sometimes whole shopping carts full with gross looking bottles which had to be separated and often emptied as well-- not a pleasant job to do considering it usually happened sometime between when school got out and the after work crowd descended on the store.
All of us were elated when our store was able to get out of the bottle deposit business when we simply stopped selling beverages in glass bottles.
But the UFCW was too dense to figure out that the retail industry wasn't going to hire 2-3 extra people per store for the 2-3 hour window when deposit demands overwhelmingly hit.
And I still have corporate VPs asking me if it’s legal to use barcodes and if the original copyright suits have been settled.
My advice to my kids was to never bully a geek because you might end up working for one someday.
Shhhhhh...you weren’t supposed to give it away....
I remember when I was a kid how they priced things before bar codes. The stock people would take a box of, let's say, soup cans off a cart. They put it on the floor and sliced the top off the box with a cutter.
They had a stamper that looked like the one in the picture above. They rotated the rubber digits that were on a belt so the correct price was lined up. Then they rapidly hit the top of each can with the stamper and the price (including the little 'cent' symbol) showed up in purple ink on the lid. Then they shelved them.
At checkout, the cashier would type the price of each item into the register.
Hard to believe when I think back on it.
I was never told that as a kid, but as an adult, I’m definitely seeing the fruits of my nerdiness. I’ve got an amazing woman (who LOVES nerds), a great engineering job, no debt, a house of my own, and hopefully a family on the way soon.
Meanwhile my brother, 3 years my junior, was Mr. Popularity in HS, bullied some of the younger nerdy kids, played a little baseball, class clown, everybody knew him sort of thing, but he’s been unemployed for the last 5 years, lives with our mother, hasn’t had more than an 1/8th of a tank of gas in his broken old truck in probably over 5 years, and he’s on food stamps.
I’ll definitely be praying for fat, nerdy kids who grow up into professionals. Seems to me, too, that the attractive jocks and cheerleaders have gone completely to shyt due to drugs, childbearing, or general poor health while I’m betting looking and in better shape than I ever was up through my 20s.
I had heard it was the middle ones that were 666??
The Cheerios box with the purple 39¢.
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