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Barcodes
WHAT ARE BARCODES?
Put quite simply, Barcodes are optical patterns that can be read by machines and turned into text which can be used by a computer.
The earliest commercial barcodes consisted of a line of vertical bars and this gave rise to the name.
Today, seven decade since barcodes were first patented, they have gone well beyond the simple symbol but we still use the same term.
It can be argued that the invention of barcodes was probably one of the most important in the last hundred years.
Now barcodes are to be found everywhere and it would be almost impossible to imagine a world without them.
HOW DID BARCODES COME ABOUT?
Legend has it that in 1948 Bernard Silver, a graduate student at the Drexel Insitute of Technology, overheard a conversation about automatically capturing information at checkout.
He approached his friend Joseph Woodland and they set out on a joint quest to achieve what we now call Auto-ID.
The story goes that Woodland moved to his grandfather's apartment in Florida.
Woodland and Silver were sitting on a beach near Miami continuing their deliberations on how to automatically identify objects.
Woodland had learned Morse Code as a Scout and drew a series of dots and dashes in the sand. These marks were continued downwards and round in a circle to form a Bullseye.
At this point the concept of the Bullseye barcode was born.
They applied for a patent and this was granted to Woodland and Silver in 1952.
It took more than two decades to overcome all of the considerable difficulties and to turn the idea into a practical reality.
There were problems with printing the barcodes accurately and finding a light bright enough to read them.
Woodland and Silver had experimented with a 500W incandescant lamp to illuminate their bullseye barcode.
Fortunately another great invention made elsewhere came to the rescue.
In 1960 Thomas Maiman of Hughes Research Laboratories demonstrated the first laser light source.
This laser was Ruby based and was a fairly large device. An observer commented that it looked like something a plumber had made.
Later that year Ali Javan of Bell Labs invented the He-Ne gas laser.
Shortly after this White and Ridge developed a red light He-Ne Laser. These lasers are still widely used today.
An industry wide competition was set up to demonstrate a retail barcode and scanner.
By this time Woodland had joined IBM.
IBM became a late entrant to the competition.
IBM asked another employee to come up with a small square symbol which could provide good reliability and be printed by existing means.
George Laurer started from scratch and designed the UPC-A barcode.
Another IBM division was asked to make the barcode scanner.
It is said that they used a He-Ne laser.
Finally, on June 26th. 1974 the first commercial UPC-A barcode was read at Troy's Marsh Supermarket in Ohio on a packet of Wigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum.
The Age of the UPC-A Barcode had arrived.
Since then retail barcodes have been enormously successful and have been applied to millions of items.
WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE?
A version of the UPC-A barcode was adapted for international use and is known as the EAN-13.
EAN-13 Barcode for Retail
EAN-13 is a structured numerical barcode which contains a Country Code, a five digit code registered to a manufacturer, a five digit product code assigned by the manufacturer and a check digit.
This code was specifically designed for Retail and is not suited to general purpose applications.
General Purpose Barcodes
Elsewhere work started on the creation of barcodes for general purpose applications.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
David Allais of Intermec developed the Interleaved 2 of 5 barcode to handle the fourteen digits required for GTIN Case Codes. ITF, as it is known now, is still in wide use today.
Allais went on to invent five types of barcode which included Code 39.
- 1974 - First Alphanumeric Barcode
- 1981 - First High Density Barcode
- 1987 - First Stacked Barcode
- 1991 - First Large Data Stacked Barcode
- 2000 - 2D Barcodes Arrive
1974 - First Alphanumeric Barcode
Code 39 was announced in 1974 and this was the first alphanumeric barcode Code 39 can handle uppercase A-Z, 0-9 and five special characters %, $, /,+ and "space". A typical Code 39 barcode has the capacity for about 20 of any combination of these characters.
It cannot be stressed enough how important a breakthrough Code 39 was. It opened up general purpose applications to alphanumeric barcodes and probably signalled the real beginning of the Age of Auto-ID.
Code 39 is still widely used today in industrial and military applications.
1981 - First High Density Barcode
Work ensued to widen the available set of characters and to increase data capacity.
There were many small steps and the next major development was the launch of Code 128 by Computer Identics Corporation in 1981.
Code 128 increased the amount of data that could be held and introduced the concept of character set switching so it can encode all of the 128 ASCII characters and can be used for Alphanumeric and Numeric barcodes.
It also led to the concept of Application Identifiers which allows the barcode to contain several different types of application data.
For example an AI with the value of 10 is followed by the Batch or Lot Number which can be up to 20 alphanumeric characters.
The combination of Code 128 and AIs led to EAN-128, now GS1-128, for retail and HIBC-128 for Healthcare.
1987 - First Stacked Barcode
Following on from Code 128 there was a quest for even more data capacity and smaller barcode symbols.
In 1987 David Allais of Intermec developed Code 49 which contained two barcodes one above the other in a stack.
This idea was extended further by Dr. Ynjium P. Wang at Symbol Technologies who invented the PDF417 in 1991.
1991 - First Large Data Stacked Barcode
PDF417 is a stacked linear barcode with 3 to 90 rows.
PDF417 barcodes can handle up to 1850 characters but the overall symbol size can be quite large.
PDF417 was a major advance and is still used today.
The search continued for barcodes with large data capacity and much more compact symbols.
2000 - 2D Barcodes Arrive
We first became aware of Data Matrix codes around 2000 and by 2003 we were reading laser engraved codes on automotive parts.
It is not known exactly when Data Matrix was invented but it was described in ISO/IEC 16022 in 2000.
Data Matrix symbols are remarkably small and have a data capacity of up to 2335 characters.
In 2004 Denso-Wave launched the QR Code which can hold up 4296 characters.
Both Data Matrix and QR Code are 2D Matrix codes which need 2D imager Barcode Scanners to read them.
The use of both codes has expanded dramatically.
QR Codes code can be read using mobile phones and tend to be used by consumers.
Although smaller in data capacity Data Matrix appears to be preferred by industry.
MORE RECENTLY
Invisible Barcodes?
Over the years we have been approached several times by people promising invisible barcodes Digimarc offers the facility to print product packaging which includes barcodes hidden to the human eye.
With this, the checkout operator no longer has to find the printed barcode. Multiple copies of the Digimarc watermark held all over the packaging produces an instant read.
This approach holds promise to speed up checkout, combat counterfeit products and so much more.
Going Completely Dotty?
Released in 2009, DotCode is a new type of 2D barcode which is comprised of unconnected dots. There are no bars or connected lines and there is no need for precise spacing.
DotCode can be printed at very high speeds and is ideal for applications involving serialisation.
DotCode can encode large amounts of data in very small spaces.
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ERRATA
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Updated 2024-03-26 at 20:09:51.
Errors and Omissions Excepted.
