THE BARCODE

Signposts of the Modern Economy

This excerpt is from The Barcode: How a Team Created One of the World's Most Ubiquitous Technologies by Paul V. McEnroe. Available from Silicon Valley Press in Fall 2023.

Ten billion or more times each day, electronic scanners “read” data encoded in black-and-white codes—barcodes—printed on or affixed to physical goods. These scans are so common, these barcodes so ubiquitous, that we scarcely notice them. They permeate every corner of our lives. They can be found on Mars rovers and ocean bottoms, in operating rooms and particle accelerators, on weaponry and church vestments, on children’s toys and giant earthmoving equipment. You are likely wearing some at this very moment. Ours is an age of inventions—integrated circuits, personal computers, smartphones, social networks—that sweep the planet seemingly overnight, reaching almost unimaginable numbers of users. The barcode is one such invention that has become one of the most-commonly used products and services in human history.

Still, despite its success and ubiquity, or perhaps because of it, the barcode is rarely noticed, much less celebrated. From Los Angeles to Lusaka to Lima, humans encounter hundreds of barcodes each day. And yet, few of us know where they came from. They were just . . . there one day, starting in the early 1970s, at the supermarket or department store or the warehouse where we worked. The price stickers shoppers had always known disappeared, replaced by zebra-striped codes. The clerk at the checkout stand was no longer reading price tags and typing those numbers into a big, noisy cash register. That clerk now stood at a computer terminal at the end of the moving track where we placed our milk and eggs and cereal, scanning each item over a glass window and twinkling with a small laser light. Suddenly the checkout lines at the grocery store seemed to move much faster.

At the back of the store, in the loading docks and warehouses, workers no longer manually recorded items on inventory lists. Instead they were armed with wands they merely waved over items. And like magic, data was automatically entered into an unseen computer, and inventory automatically replenished. Perhaps not surprisingly, this dramatic new technology also raised fears and doubts. Where did these barcodes, these wands, come from? How did they work? And what would be their impact? Would this new technology take away jobs? And what about lasers? Would that bright light behind the glass blind checkout workers? Was the government planning to tattoo people with individual barcodes to track and control them? No one knew the long-term economic or personal effects.

Decades later, those reactions seem laughable. Indeed, within a couple years of the barcode’s introduction, most people assimilated the technology into their daily lives to the point that they noticed it only on the rare occasions when it failed to work: when the checkout clerk had to call a stock clerk to do a price check, an act that once characterized shopping. Barcodes had another, more subtle impact, one we can see only in retrospect. They made it possible to order, track, and process the sale of goods at an unprecedented pace and accuracy—paving the way for the giant supermarkets and big-box stores. The average supermarket these days has as many as 60,000 different products. Retailers like Amazon offer exponentially more. It is impossible to imagine Amazon, with its vast warehouses, its overnight delivery of everything from books to refrigerators, being able to operate without barcodes on every one of its items, envelopes, and boxes.

The barcode is so pervasive, its use so common, that it’s difficult to measure. Ten billion scans a day is merely a rough (and likely conservative) estimate, up from only a few years ago at six billion. Even that staggering growth curve is likely shallow as second-generation, two-dimensional “QR” codes (those black-and-white squares on everything from magazine ads to real-estate signs, designed to carry far more information than their original two-dimensional predecessors) are increasingly adopted. As we point our smartphones at our TV screens to download the latest fashion or music, there’s little doubt that barcode technology is on the verge of an even more awesome growth spurt.

I had the honor of managing the team at IBM that created and standardized a practical, usable barcode technology. We overcame endless technical and cultural obstacles to turn this dream into a real, workable and, most importantly, practical family of products. In the process, we changed the world. And in the end, that is the true test of any new invention.