It's the birthday for an icon of retailing.
The Barcode.
The design was straightforward — 59 black and white bars. And the inventors’ objectives were simple enough, too — to speed up the grocery checkout line and give supermarkets a new tool to track their stock.
But the bar code has become much more than that since it was first used to read the price on a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit gum (67 cents) on the morning of June 26, 1974.
Today, bar codes are scanned more than 10 billion times a day around the world.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/31566093/
6.30.2009
Happy 35th!
Posted by MC at 7:40 AM
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1 comments:
The article says the bar code “has almost acquired a certain antique appeal as an early expression of the sorting and categorizing impulse in computer-driven marketing and sales,” It said, “in some ways a charmingly archaic icon.”
Guess that makes 35 the new 10!
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