TEKOA Software: History of Bar Code Scanning
By: Zayne Hamilton
At TEKOA Software, we have several great options when it comes to mobile
The barcode
scanner was born out of a need for inventory management. At the corner grocery
store, managers wanted to be able to rely on more than mere estimates and
feelings when counting every single item in stock. This time consuming process
was done infrequently, at most once a month. For the modern businessperson,
this seems absurd.
Later on, supermarket management
personnel realized they were in a competitive marketplace, and that shopper's
patronage relied on having the products they desired on-hand - all the time.
Some owners considered using the punch-card technology that was developed in the
late 19th century to complete the US Census. The vision was that the customer
would punch the cards to mark their selections, the cards would be put in a
reader at check-out, and a sales tally by product would be kept for the
re-ordering process. But the consumer market was moving towards more
convenience and time savings, and the proposal wasn't even prototyped.
We can trace the idea of the modern barcode to
around 1948, when a graduate student at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia
heard a conversation between one of the faculty and an executive of a food
store chain. The executive was trying to convince the faculty member to have
the school develop a system to quickly and accurately capture product data at
the check-out counter. The student, Bernie Silver relayed the conversation to
Norman "Joe" Woodland, a teacher at the institute. The problem
intrigued Woodland, and for the next 2 years he would experiment with a variety
of data collection techniques to find the one that worked.
Woodland "invented" the first barcode,
basically by using Morse code - a series of dots and dashes used in telegraph
and radio communications. Woodland wrote out the dots and dash representation
of the product number and extended the lines of each vertically creating the first
linear barcode. To read the barcode, Woodland adapted the DeForest movie sound
system from 20 years earlier that used a sensitive tube to detect the projector
light shining through the side of the film. In the movie industry, the light
detected would be converted into sound. In Woodland and Silver's adaptation,
the reflected light would be converted to numbers.
And there you have it.
The first barcode scanners. Today, TEKOA has in stock some of the most advanced
barcode scanners for your convenience. In your business, you want your
customers to have exactly what they ordered, for maximum satisfaction, and in
turn, good reviews. The TEKOA scanners make it easier than ever to keep track
of exactly what you have in stock. They run full Android or Windows operating
systems, and are at a lower than retail value for your business.
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