The barcode (or more correctly, the Universal Product Code) turns 35 years old today.
This the kind of innovation that efficiency geeks like me just love, love , LOVE!
The amount of time and effort and energy saved by barcodes is truly impossible to calculate.
I’m old enough to remember standing in the check out line at the grocery store with my parents, waiting (and waiting….) for the cashier to read each price sticker and punch it into the cash register. And before we left the store, my mother would go through each line on the receipt, searching for errors. She found a lot.
This blurb claims a typical error rate for human input is 1 mistake per 300 characters, so I guess a mistake or two per grocery cart full of items wouldn’t be unusual.
I also recall some hard core holy roller types of the day preaching from the pulpit that this was surely the “mark of the beast” warned about in the book of Revelations.
I see some of those folks are still at it today!
And who can forget George Bush, the elder, staring with a gee whiz look at the laser scanner in 1992, and the MSM media spin that followed?
Gee, some of that stuff sounds so familiar….
Anyway, here’s a tip o the hat to those anonymous geeks who, 35-40 years ago, worked this stuff out for us all !
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“Originally developed to help supermarkets speed up the checkout process, the first live use of a U.P.C. took place in a Marsh Supermarkets store in Troy, Ohio, on June 26, 1974…”
Well, sort of. Actually, bar coding was first developed for Canadian Rail by IBM World Trade. The railroad “lost” an awful lot of boxcars and wanted a way to track them automatically. The system was refined to track all sorts of inventory, and POS scanning was a natural.
Are you old enough, like I am, to remember being told that these bar codes were “The Mark of The Beast,” a sign of the End Times, and/or proof that the world would soon be taken over by, and we would be enslaved by, computers?
Well we have been enslaved to them I guess. Sort of…
If bar codes are bad, then RFID must be truly EVIL!!!!
I should have added “too?” to the end of that.
I really have a fascination for the never-ending phenomenon of people who are absolutely convinced we are in the End Times right now and Jesus (or sometimes the Space Aliens or someone else) will be arriving any moment.
FWIW, almost all Christian denominations, including the vast majority of Protestants, view that stuff with scorn. It’s really more folk religion than anything mainstream within Christianity. Although it’s very popular in some circles. In my day it was guys like Hal Lindsay, who really impressed me when I was young and impressionable and unable to look back on his huge body of really laughably wrong predictions (you’d think that his book “The 1980s, Countdown to Armageddon” would have permanently destroyed his reputation, but he’s still got a loyal fan base). These days, it appears to be ultra-mega-moneymakers Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jekins. Although they all seem to still use as their primary source and inspiration the late Cyrus Scofield, whose work, now 100 years later, is still pretty transparently the source that these false prophets rely most heavily upon in their efforts to make themselves rich duping well-meaning Christians.
Try as you might, too, you can’t generally convince some people that these guys aren’t mainstream even to Protestantism, let alone Christianity as a whole. Even Catholic and Orthodox Christians sometimes get sucked into their madness, which is why they’ve both felt the need to say something about these false teachers. But be assured, Protestants absolutely reject this theology in overwhelming numbers–indeed, many consider it non-Christian, pagan mythology dressed up in pseudo-Christian garb. I’m not quite inclined to agree with that–even nutjob Christians are still Christians–but it’s definitely way outside of what the vast majority of the world’s Christians, regardless of denomination, actually teach.
But I still can’t get enough of it. I find it endlessly entertaining, even if I feel a little sad for those sucked in by it. Sometimes, even generally pretty smart Christians, even good friends. Ah well.
I think you hit the key phrase there, Dean:
“ultra-mega-moneymakers”
There’s always cash to be made in doom and gloom predictions.
And if you can offer a solution, well, that’s the road to megabucks….
Still some rough edges, though. Bar codes on newspapers almost never scan properly–if you try to buy one at a bookstore, the clerk will usually have to scan it 3 or 4 times, and often gives up and enters the UPC manually. Then he still has to enter the price separately, because for some odd reason the bookstore POS systems don’t usually have these publications in their price database.
Jay: Yeah well there’s nothing wrong with making (some) money off of preaching per se, but these guys are industries unto themselves, and they pretty clearly aren’t about “bringing people to Christ” so much as scaring the willies off of people who are already Christian (and also scare some people away from Christianty–it would sure scare me away, who could worship such a God?). There’s no positive impact to their theology whatsoever that I can see other than providing jobs to the people who work for their businesses and sell their books.
As the (Orthodox) bishop whose commentary I linked says, too, the fundamental tenet of the preaching is based on the assumption that there is an elite tiny core of Christians who understand the “true” message and are thus either getting special dispensation/favors in how they’re “saved” or, in some cases, are the only ones who are truly saved. It’s a form of elitism that is just plain alien to the scriptures and to the plain intent of the New Testament.
I define “end times” as nothing more than what happens to me as the expected end of my life grows nearer. Humans are little more than chickens with large and compex brains who know early on that mother nature in the form of human biochemistry is waiting there with an ax to chop their heads off.
As for bar codes and human individuality, I think the latter will certainly survive. But each of us will be identified by his or her own personal barcode, with its alphanumeric designations. And the time may come when people will identify as much with their barcoded numbers as I do with my social security number and even with my well-remembered US military serial number from 57 years ago.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
By the way, a brief mention in defense of George H.W. Bush: he was not actually commenting in astonishment at the whole idea of bar code scanners. He was actually being given a demonstration of a new and more advanced and easy to use version of the technology (circa 1992)–basically, I remember right, it was when the newer versions were coming out where you could scan and read the bar code from multiple directions easily. Prior to that you really had to hit the code right on at a perfect angle, and there had even been complaints and research showing that grocery store clerks tended to develop long-term problems with things like Carpal Tunnel Syndrome from having to orient everything perfectly.
And yes, by the way, you still have to get the angle right these days and sometimes still get frustrated and have to fight to get the scanner to read, but it was WAY tougher back then, you had to hit the angle in exactly one correct position, you couldn’t just wave it around until it finally read it like you can now.
The point is, Poppy Bush wasn’t THAT dumb, he was just getting a demonstration of this new version of a familiar gizmo that was being rolled out in a lot of stores, and this was one of the stores to have one of the newer units coming online, and he was doing the usual politician schtick of saying something nice when someone showed him something like that.
There was also the very fair question of whether someone who’d just spent the last 8 years serving as Vice President and followed around by a Secret Service detail everywhere he went should have been expected to be doing his own casual shopping, but…
Enh, it’s politics. It was a cheap shot against him, but it worked.
(And no, I never voted for him by the way.)
A few days ago, I went shopping with Stefi as I sometimes do, at Woodman Foods, one of Madison’s super supermarkets. When we finish, we sometimes use the self-service checkout equipped with a barcode scanner. This time, with a large load of grocery items, we opted for a live checkout counter.
The two young gals on duty there , one scanning and the other packing the goods into paper shopping bags, were an impressively competent team. They got everything done about five times as fast as Stefi and I could have done, even if we worked at what we think would be our highest achievable level of amateur efficiency.
The cans, bottles, boxes, sacks of veggies, etc, all but flew through the scanner. If there was any problem with carpal syndrome, it was not apparent with the team leader at that checkout counter.
As for HW (41) doing his own shopping, why the hell not? He was fully capable of jumping out of a plane and parachuting down in some replay of the D-Day invasion of Normandy, wasn’t he? Even retirees of national note should be encouraged to do as much for themselves as they are capable of performing. Otherwise they get the idea they serve no further purpose in life. And no, I wasn’t particularly an admirer of 41; but that’s not the point.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
In the olden days, sometime over 20 years ago, when my son became a bagger (Dad, we are not baggers, we are courtesy clerks) in the local grocery store, he had the good fortune to become a cashier.
As luck would have it, he was informed after a trial period, that the expected rate of barcode success for a cashier was not less than 18 items per minute, for those that wish to keep their jobs.
Naturally, he became motivated to achieve success.
The moral of the story to this day, is, I can go to the same grocery store and repeatedly the teletype machine that scans the checks I write never quite make it through the process and the cashier after a few mutterings, picks up the check and hand codes it into the machinery.
It’s the banks fault because they use bad ink on the checks, so I’ve been told.
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