Happy Birthday to the Bar Code
It's hard to believe it has been 38 years since the Bar Code was first born.
On June 26, 1974, Clyde Dawson went to Marsh's Supermarket located in Troy, Ohio near the NCR facility where the first bar code test equipment was developed. Clyde pulled a bright yellow 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum out of his shopping basket. It was scanned by checker Sharon Buchanan at 8:01 am. The pack of gum and the receipt are now on display in the Smithsonian Institution. It was the first commercial appearance of the UPC code.
Since that day, millions, perhaps billions of dollars have been saved as a result of this quantum leap in technology. It was a watershed event for retail and other industries who started to realize the significant cost savings bar coding unlocked.
Printronix was one of the first manufacturers to develop industrial grade thermal bar code printers, bringing the technology to the forefront of supply chain logistics and heavy-duty labeling applications. Our T5000r thermal bar code printer was the first ENERGY STAR qualified industrial grade thermal printer on the market. Printronix has developed Online Data Validation, a technology which scans bar codes as they are printed to ensure that 100% quality bar codes are produced. Bad bar codes are overstriked, saving our customers thousands of dollars in lost productivity and compliance fines. The Online Data Validation (ODV) can be purchased as an option for our T5000r and SLT5000r RFID thermal bar code printers.
Happy Birthday Bar Code! The world wouldn't be the same without you.
