Happy Thought for 15 March 2024

Have a Happy Thought:

Over the past few years, we’ve all gotten used to QR codes, those square codes that you can scan with your phone.

The predecessor to those codes is something much more familiar to us all… so familiar that we don’t even think twice about these being on almost everything we buy: a bar code.

Bar codes are actually something invented well within the lifespan of many people reading this… and they could have looked very VERY different.

 

You see, in the early 1970s, a bunch of different companies were starting to experiment with their own bar code designs. And, luckily for us all today, a group within the grocery industry realised a) how useful barcodes could be for grocery stores, food producers, and everyone in between; and b) how opposite-of-useful it would be if there were 20 different kinds of barcode that would require 20 different types of barcode reader.

 

So they created a committee to standardise what would become known as the Universal Product Code, or UPC. They ran a competition amongst the companies that had started to create their own codes, and slowly – and with much struggle – narrowed it down to one.

 

Here are the top seven that made it through for final consideration:

The seven bar code symbol finalists displayed in the official internal reports of the symbol selection committee. Source: Symbol Standards Subcommittee.

 Now, you would think that all of these companies would fight really really hard to make sure that their design won, right? Well, here’s the deal – by entering this competition, the “top seven” all got paid for their design, on the condition that it would then become public domain. So they couldn’t copyright the image design and continue to make money off of it.

 But since their main “customer”, the grocery industry, agreed to all use the ‘winner’, these companies could all make money instead by creating and selling the scanners. Individual grocery stores could then choose between any of the scanner products, because they all scan the same code.

 A win-win!

 

There’s a lot more detail to this whole story, including some truly wacky sub-plots, and if that piques your interest check out this podcast episode (or you can read the transcript): https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/01/the-last-days-of-the-barcode/677185/

Or this article: https://theconversation.com/how-we-almost-ended-up-with-a-bulls-eye-bar-code-219194

 

And I will leave you with an image of what could have been, had the railroad industry taken charge of this, rather than the grocery industry:  

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