Gerry C Shih
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.
They even played a role in the 1992 presidential race, when the elder George Bush, running for re-election against Bill Clinton, seemed at a campaign stop to be puzzled by what had long been a technological staple of everyday life. 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.
?It was cheap and it was needed,? said George J Laurer, who was already a veteran engineer at IBM in 1970 when he was asked to lead a team assigned to devise a checkout system for grocery stores. ?And it is reliable. Those three things probably contributed more than anything else.? Now 84 and retired, Laurer continues to be a cheerleader for his invention even as the bar code is challenged by newer and much more sophisticated competitors. Radio frequency identification (RFID), is one such technology.
Bar codes have evolved to respond to the competition. In recent years, two-dimensional matrices, which resemble jumbled checkerboards and carry much more information than bar codes, have come into use in Japan and the US.