Know A Little History Of Barcodes

1. Article1:Sabarcodes.co.za KNOW A LITTLE HISTORY OF BARCODES Retail store owners know the pain of having to maintain track of inventory all too well. Early on when barcodes were not invented, this activity was something which was associated with consumption of a lot of time and manpower, and riddled with inefficiency. The retail stores suffered with undocumented transactions, number mismatch and other issues related to documenting the flow of goods. A few attempts at inventory tracking had been tried and rejected due to inherent issues. Somewhere in the 19th century, a student named Wallace Flint envisaged a store where, for the purpose of keeping track of what was sold, a punch-card system similar to what we see for employees today existed. He proposed that punch cards be used to purchase the goods, which would then be brought to the consumers on a conveyor belt, and things would then get documented automatically. However, this required a heavy and expensive technological set up, which was a challenge to achieve back then. It was realised then that an efficient mechanism was needed, probably automated, that could handle all this. About fifteen years later, a student named Bernard Silver overheard a conversation where businessmen were discussing the need to come up with an automated inventory management mechanism. Silver mentioned this to a graduate student named Norman Woodland, who got hung up on the idea of actually inventing something like this. The first attempts of Woodland included using inks that were visible in ultraviolet light to do the documentation. Later on he discovered that the implementation of this idea would incur needless printing costs. However, his invention was what laid the foundation stone for the invention of productbarcodes. It had set the ball rolling. Woodland and Silver came up with another idea to extend the dots and dashes in a Morse code to make bars and stripes, to create a code which could hold product information. This code was printed in an ink that could reflect light in certain patterns, and produce information. It was the first generation barcode. However, the set up required to actually read the reflected patterns of light was very bulky and expensive, so eventually, when patented, the price set on this machine was very high. Later on, this patent was sold to RCA. Another form of “barcoding” system was springing up elsewhere, through the innovation of a person named David Collins. He invented a pattern of blue and orange colors which represented different sets of information. Through using a special light and equipment, this pattern could be “read” to reveal where the item belonged and its identification number. Collins went on to invent the modern barcodes that we know today, after facing innumerable setbacks along the way. He discovered that handy lasers could accomplish the same job that Woodland’s bulky machine could. Such heavy equipment was no longer needed. His blues and oranges turned into whites and blacks: much like the kind what we see today. Ever since then, barcoding system has only been evolving.Barcode numbers are now an integral part of products business, enabling the stores to achieve efficient management. For more interesting information on online barcodes, visit Sabarcodes.co.za

2. Article1:Sabarcodes.co.za ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jennifer Greene is a post-graduate student in Business Management, who specializes in logistics, inventory, procurement and sales. She has written many articles on inventory management, and believes www.sabarcodes.co.za to be a very good source of information and online barcodes.