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UPC
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UPC
Main article: Universal Product Code
In 1966 the National Association of Food Chains (NAFC) held a meeting where they discussed the idea of using automated checkout systems. RCA, having purchased rights to the original Woodland patent, had attended the meeting and set up an internal project to develop a system based on the bullseye code. The Kroger grocery chain volunteered to test it.
In mid-1970, the NAFC started an ad hoc committee to look into bar codes, the Uniform Grocery Product Code Council. The committee set guidelines for bar code development and created a symbol selection subcommittee to help standardize the approach. In cooperation with McKinsey & Co. (a consulting firm), they developed a standardized 11-digit code to identify any product. The committee then sent out a contract tender to develop a system to print and read the code. The request went to Singer, National Cash Register (NCR), Litton Industries, RCA, Pitney-Bowes, IBM and many others.[3] A wide variety of barcode approaches were studied; linear codes, RCA’s bullseye, and other systems with starburst patterns or odder varieties.
In the spring of 1971 RCA demonstrated their bullseye code at another industry meeting. IBM executives at the meeting noticed the crowds at the RCA booth, and immediately set out to develop their own system. Alec Jablonover, a marketing specialist at IBM, remembered that the company still employed the system’s inventor. Woodland was set up in new facilities in North Carolina, where IBM’s version of the encoding was developed.
In July 1972 RCA began an eighteen-month test of their system in a Kroger store in Cincinnati. Barcodes were printed on small pieces of adhesive paper, and attached by hand by store employees when they were adding price tags. The code proved to have a serious problem. During printing, presses sometimes smear ink in the direction the paper is running; with the bullseye code this rendered the code unreadable in most orientations. A linear code – like the one being developed by Woodland at IBM – was printed in the direction of the stripes, so extra ink simply makes the code “taller”, and it remains readable.
On 3 April 1973 the IBM UPC code was selected by NAFC as their standard. NCR installed a testbed system at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, near the factory that was producing the equipment. On 26 June 1974, Clyde Dawson pulled a 10-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum out of his basket and it was scanned by Sharon Buchanan at 8:01 am. The pack of gum and the receipt are now on display in the Smithsonian Institution.
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