SMART BAR CODES

Abstract

1948, a local food chain store owner approached Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia asking about research into a method of automatically reading product information during checkout. Bernard Silver, a graduate student at Drexel Institute, along with fellow graduate student Norman Joseph Woodland, teamed together to develop a solution.On October 20, 1949, Woodland and Silver succeeded in building a working prototype describing their invention as “article classification†through the medium of identifying patternsâ€. On October 7, 1952, they were granted a patent (US Patent #2,612,994) for their “Classifying Apparatus and Methodâ€. Efforts to develop a working system accelerated in the 1960’s.Bar coding was first used commercially in 1966, but to make the system acceptable to the industry as a whole there would have to be some sort of industry standard. By 1970, Logicon Inc. had developed the Universal Grocery Products Identification Code (UGPIC). The first company to produce barcode equipment for retail trade using (using UGPIC) was the American company Monarch Marking (1970), and for industrial use, the British company Plessey Telecommunications (1970).In 1972, a committee was formed within the grocery industry to select a standard code to be used in the industry. IBM proposed a design, based upon the UGPIC work and similar to today’s UPC code. On April 3, 1973, the committee selected the UPC symbol (based on the IBM proposal) as the industry standard. George J. Laurer is considered the inventor of U.P.C. or Uniform Product Code.