A Short History of the Barcode
Solving the checkout problem
In 1948, a supermarket executive visited the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia and asked a dean if the university could help develop a new system for encoding product information in a machine-readable format that checkout systems could read. However, the dean said the proposed project was outside the school’s curriculum and declined the executive’s request.
The executive was Sam Friedland, founder and president of the Food Fair supermarket chain headquartered in Philadelphia. Friedland had firsthand knowledge of the limitations of the existing supermarket checkout system, which explains why he went out of his way to ask for help in devising a better one. At the time, checkout systems had no way of reading product information and identifying items at the point of sale. This created issues:
- Employees had to put price labels on individual items to tell identify how much items cost. For hard-to-label...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to hackernoon.com. To see the full text click HERE
