The RCA submission was the early leader among the seven finalists. The seven barcode symbol finalists displayed in the official internal reports of the symbol selection committee. They solicited applications from various companies and narrowed the pool down to seven finalists. The committee then had to choose the symbol. The data standard the committee developed - the Universal Product Code - was designed to work with different types of barcode symbols. So in 1971, the grocery industry formed a committee tasked with developing an industrywide data standard and choosing a symbol that stores would agree to adopt. Otherwise, the system would be overly complex and expensive. The grocery industry soon realized that this Wild West period of experimentation couldn’t last.īarcodes could work as a way to automate inventory and checkout only if everyone in the grocery industry agreed to use the same symbol. For example, a company named Carecogn had developed a sun-shaped symbol the Litton company created a fan symbol. But other stores used symbols developed by other companies. One of the symbols was the original bull’s-eye bar code, which by that point was owned by RCA (because it had purchased the patent rights). In the late 1960s, stores began barcode pilot projects that used vastly different types of bar code symbols. Despite being the first barcode to be officially adopted by an industry, the multicolored design of the Kartrak symbol is now just a footnote in history.Īround the same time Kartrak was launched, the grocery industry set in motion a chain of events that eventually resulted in the barcode we know today. Kartrak barcodes were developed to automatically identify rail cars as they moved past scanners, but they used a design of lines of varying colors that looks more like a piece of modern art than the barcodes we use today.īut Kartrak struggled from the start - the system wasn’t as accurate as people had hoped - and it stopped being used in the 1970s. Not long afterward, in 1967, the railroad industry implemented Kartrak, which was the world’s first official barcode system. Maiman built the first working laser, which made it possible to quickly decode a barcode’s line patterning. But the barcode’s fortunes began to change in 1960, when the engineer and physicist Theodore H. Woodland and Silver initially struggled to get companies interested in their invention. The bull’s-eye barcode introduced in Woodland and Silver’s 1949 patent.
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