The first modern barcode was scanned 50 years ago this summer—on a 10-pack of chewing gum in a grocery store in Troy, Ohio. Fifty is ancient for most technologies, but barcodes are still going strong.

The UPC barcode, appearing as a sequence of vertical lines on a product label, revolutionized the retail industry 50 years ago by automating price lookup at checkout. While the technology has endured, ...

Even the smallest operational detail can make or break a product’s success, and few details are as deceptively simple yet powerful as a barcode. For businesses that manufacture, package, or sell ...

The next generation of barcodes includes a heavy emphasis on QR codes and smartphone-use. Fifty years ago, on June 26, 1974, the first universal product code (UPC) was scanned at a Marsh Supermarket ...

Barcodes are set to disappear in favour of modern QR codes. After more than 50 years of ubiquity, the organisation that oversees the world's barcodes is preparing to consign them to the bargain bin of ...

Discover the old-school supermarket chain where the first barcode was scanned -- and how that single moment revolutionized ...

Once upon a time, a restless cashier would eye each and every item you, the consumer, purchased and key it into the register. This took skill but also time—and proved to be an imperfect way to keep ...

Before the barcode was introduced, managing inventory from label to self to checkout was time consuming and manual. Not only was this process inefficient, but there ...

When nearly 20 years ago, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a new rule 1 that pharmaceutical manufacturers must include a linear bar code on all immediate drug packages that included each ...

Barcodes work based on light reflected back to scanner optics: black does not reflect light, while the white (blank) spaces do reflect light. Because characters (alphabetic, numeric, special) are ...