Barcode

BARCODE

INTRODUCTION

A barcode is an optical machine-readable representation of data relating to the object to which it is attached. Originally barcodes represented data by varying the widths and spacings of parallel lines; any may be referred to as linear or-one-dimensional (ID). Later they evolved into rectangles, dots, hexagons and other geometrics patterns in two dimension (2D). Although (2D). System use a  variety of symbols, they are generally referred to as barcodes as well. Barcodes originally were scanned by special optical scanners called barcode reader; later, scanners and interpretive software became available on devices including desktop printers and smartphones.

The first use of barcodes was to label railroad cars, but they were not commercially successful until they were used to automate supermarket checkout system, a task for which they have become almost universal. Their use has spread to many other task that are generically referred to as automatic identification and data capture (AIDC). The very first scanning of the now ubiquitous universal product code (UPC) barcode was on a pack of Wrigley company chewing gum is June 1976, (Fox, M. 2011).

Other system have made inroads in the AIDS market, but the simplicity, university and low cost of barchoses has limited the role of these other systems until the 2000s (decade), over 40 years after the introduction of the commercial barcode, with the introduction of technologies such as radio frequency identification, or RFID.

History

In 1948 Bernerd Silver, a graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA overheard the president of the local food chain, food fair, asking one of the deans to research a system to automatically read product information during checkout (Fishman, c. 2001) silver told his friend Norman Joseph Woodland about the request, and they started working on a variety of systems. Their first working system used ultraviolet ink, but the ink too easily faded and was fairly expensive (Seideman, T., 2002).

Convinced that they system was workable with further development, Woodland left Drexel, moved into his father’s apartment in Florida, and continued working on the system. His next inspiration came from Morse code, and he formed his first barcode from sand of the beach. “I just extended the dots and dashes downwards and made narrow lines and wide lines out of them (Seideman, T., 2002). “To read them, he adapted technology from optical soundtracks in movies, using a 500-watt light bulb shining through the paper into an RCA935 photomultiplier tube (from a movie projector) on the far side. He later decided that they system would work better if it were printed as a circle instead of a line, allowing it to be scanned in any direction.

THE BODY

On 20 October 1949 Woodland and Silver filed a patent application for “Classifying Apparatus and Method, in which they described both the linear and bullseys printing patterns, as well as the mechanical and electronic systems needed to read the code. The patent was issued on 7 October 1952 as US patent 2,612,994, in 1951, Woodland moved to IBM and continually tried to interest IBM in developing the system. The company eventually commissioned a report on the idea, which concluded that if was both feasible and interesting, but that processing the resulting information would require equipment that was some time off in the future.

IBM offered to buy the patent, but its offer was not high enough. Philco purchased their patent in 1962 and then sold it to RCA sometime later (Seideman, T., 2002),

Collins at Sylvania

During his time as an undergraduate, David Collins worked at the penneylvania Railroad and became aware of the need to automatically identify railroad cars. Immediately after receiving his master’s degree from MIT in 1959, he started work at GTE Sylvania and began addressing the problem. He developed a system called Kartrak using blue and yellow reflective stripes attached to the side of the cars, encoding a six-digit company identifier and a four-digit car number (Seideman, T., 2002) Light reflected off the stripes was fed into one of two photomultipliers, filtered for blue or yellow.

COMPUTER IDENTICS CORPORATION

During his time as an undergraduate, David Collin worked at the Pennsylvania Railroad and became aware of the need to automatically identify railroad cars. Immediately after receiving his master’s degree from MIT in 1959, he started work at GTE Sylvania and began addressing the problem. He developed a system called Kartrak using blue and yellow reflective stripes attached to the side of the cars, encoding a six- digit company identifier and a four-digit car number (Seideman, T., 2002). Ligth reflected off the strips was fed into one of two photomultipliers, filtered for blue or yellow.