It’s 35th birthday of Bar Code Scanning

Can you imagine, what would a trip to the check-out line in a grocery store be like if cashiers had to manually enter each purchase?

Would packages in the mail ever reach your home if there was no bar code and scanner to trace its whereabouts?

The first bar code scanned was on a pack of chewing gum at 8:06 a.m. on June 26, 1974 at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio.

The package of gum is in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.

Manufacturers recognized its importance and requested a product to decode the bar code and in 1980, LS100, the first hand held portable scanner was introduced by Symbol -  a company that was acquired by Motorola in 2007. From the introduction by Symbol Technologies of the LS100, the first handheld scanner in 1980, to the sale of the three-millionth LS2208 scanner in 2008, Motorola’s barcode scanning experts have led the World in innovation, usability and sales.

The use of the bar code has resulted in significant economic and productivity gains for shoppers, retailers and manufacturers – with estimated cost savings of $17 billion in the grocery sector alone (according to GS1 US).  Currently, bar code scanners are being used by 25 industries including consumer packaged goods, apparel, hardware, food services, healthcare, logistics, government, high-tech electronics, sales, inventory tracking, shipping, airline check-in, lottery & gaming. Bar code scanners have much reduced error rate of one in 36 trillion characters in comparison to rate for human data entry which is one error per 300 characters whereas; the cost to implement a bar code is only US$0.005.

Motorola has created a symbiotic relationship between bar codes and scanners, driving innovation with industry milestones from introducing the first handheld mobile computer with an embedded laser scanner to the development of PDF417, the most widely used 2D barcode in the world. In 2000, Symbol Technologies was the only company (that year) to receive the prestigious National Medal of Technology.

The award was a tribute to Symbol’s breakthroughs in miniaturized bar code scanning, mobile computing and wireless data and voice network communications, which have enabled new levels of accuracy, speed and efficiency. Motorola continues to innovate in Advanced Data Capture Technologies and produce the highest quality scanners on the market.

(Source : Motorola)