{"id":9427,"date":"2021-04-27T09:35:32","date_gmt":"2021-04-27T16:35:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qad.com\/blog\/?p=9427"},"modified":"2021-04-28T16:11:57","modified_gmt":"2021-04-28T23:11:57","slug":"the-evolution-of-barcode-systems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.qad.com\/blog\/2021\/04\/the-evolution-of-barcode-systems","title":{"rendered":"The Evolution of Barcode Systems: From Morse Code to QR Codes"},"content":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”9428″ img_size=”full”][vc_column_text]In today\u2019s world of emerging technologies, Morse code can seem like a long-forgotten form of communication. But did you know that the Capitol Records building in Los Angeles, California uses Morse code to send out an ongoing message? According to Wikipedia<\/a>,<\/span>\u00a0\u201cThe blinking light atop the tower spells out the word “Hollywood” in Morse code.\u201d And did you know that <\/span>April 27th is recognized every year as <\/span>Morse Code Day<\/span><\/a>? I\u2019ll admit, I didn\u2019t, but the topic is near and dear to me.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My father served in the British Royal Air Force and was involved in radio work and RADAR (coined in the 1940s for Radio Detection And Ranging). He was also a keen <\/span>ham radio<\/span><\/a> operator. In fact, I remember him whistling his ham radio call sign in Morse code at the dinner table! We had it engraved on his gravestone when he sadly passed away in 2020. So anything about Morse code has already grabbed my attention.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s talk a little more about this telecommunication method that dates all the way back to the mid-1800s.<\/span><\/p>\n

Morse Code and the Revolution of Long-Distance Communication<\/span><\/h2>\n

Morse code is behind one of the biggest revolutions in production and every form of <\/span>manufacturing<\/span><\/a>. Developed in the 1840s for use with Samuel F.B. Morse\u2019s electric telegraph, Morse code simplified communications, allowing users to send messages around the world via electric pulses through wired telegraph lines and later through radio waves. Morse code gave rise to barcodes and UPC codes which later gave rise to QR codes, giving us the ability to track the entire lifespan of a product or component from raw materials to the end-of-life recycling process.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now we use barcodes to send and track materials, products and parcels around the world. And the two are directly related.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Morse Code Foundation for Early Barcodes<\/span><\/h2>\n

Perhaps you\u2019ve heard the story of Norman Joseph Woodland. In 1948, a Philadelphia supermarket manager contacted the dean at Drexel Institute of Technology looking for a way to move shoppers through the store and check-out lanes faster and make stock-taking more efficient. Graduate student Woodland took on the challenge. While sitting on a beach in Florida, he used Morse code (which he learned during his Boy Scout days) to create the barcode when he \u201cextended the dots and dashes downward and made narrow lines and wide lines out of them\u201d to solve the grocery store puzzle.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy idea originally came from\u2026the \u2018dash-dot-dash\u2019 pattern of Morse code,\u201d Woodland said in 1991, according to IBM. \u201cThat\u2019s essentially what barcoding is…a non-verbal symbol…a Morse code for reading a label.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Because of its need for a specific orientation, Morse code was limited. So, Woodland drew his lines into a target-shaped circle.<\/span><\/p>\n

In October 1949, Woodland and fellow Drexel alum Bernard Silver built a working prototype describing their invention as \u201carticle classification\u2026through the medium of identifying patterns.\u201d Three years later, they received U.S. Patent # 2,612,994 for their \u201cClassifying Apparatus and Method.\u201d It consisted of thick and thin concentric circles, like a target or bullseye, that could be scanned from any orientation.<\/span><\/p>\n

It took a while for technology to catch up to Woodland\u2019s prototype \u2013 optical scanners were large and expensive. Philco, RCA and IBM all played a part in getting the technology worked out with lasers and microchips, to invent a device capable of reading code. With the revolutionary inventions of microchips in 1958 and lasers in 1960, early barcode reader capabilities became possible.<\/span><\/p>\n

Evolution of Bullseye Barcodes to UPC Codes<\/span><\/h2>\n

In the early 1970s, George Lauer at IBM changed the bullseye barcode into a rectangular shape with thick and thin parallel lines, which he dubbed the universal product code or UPC. IBM set up a test demo with a coded label on a baseball which they threw over a laser to read the code \u2013 it worked.<\/span><\/p>\n

In June 1974, at Marsh\u2019s Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, a 10-pack of gum became the first product ever scanned for sale. Ten years later, barcodes became ubiquitous in grocery and drug stores and by 1991, clothing stores, hardware stores, and even sporting arenas started adopting barcodes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Inventory Management Systems, Real-time Data and ERP<\/span><\/h2>\n

The 1990s saw the beginning of real-time inventory management systems capturing point of sale and demand data, managed by a backend <\/span>ERP system<\/span><\/a>. I remember working with a QAD customer automating its warehouse services. I wrote the software to produce the barcode labels with the goal of <\/span>reducing labor costs via automation<\/span><\/a>. The\u00a0 goal was to identify how to get the product to the correct store location of the big retailer, as automatically as possible. We combined the labels with Advanced Shipping Notices (ASNs) sent to a shipper that used this information to sort packages for national distribution. It was fascinating to see how quickly the products moved through the scanning process. A barcode could be scanned from any orientation by a scanner and in the blink of an eye. Ironically, I learned that scanners at the time seemed to have a problem with blue packaging \u2013 the manufacturer needed to change some of their package colors to remedy this!<\/span><\/p>\n

Barcode Data Limitations Lead to Development of QR Codes<\/span><\/h2>\n

Barcodes in their earliest iterations were limited to 12 digits. The need for more data on labels led to the origins of 2-D Quick Read or QR codes, that can hold 7,000 digits or 4,000 letters\/characters. In 1994, Denso Wave engineer Masahiro Hara, inspired by the game of Go with its black and white squares and spaces, worked to orient the patterns into data to expand how much data a code could hold.<\/span><\/p>\n

With QR codes, manufacturers are no longer limited in the amount of information they can add to a code. Instead of being limited to a UPC code that could only identify a product model, you could now identify each serialized product. Thus, every single iteration of a product can have a unique QR code. For example, every unique medical device QR code has an identifier that contains its individual history. <\/span>Traceability improves<\/span><\/a>, efficiency improves. Product QR codes can also include a website URL link, offering even greater amounts of information.<\/span><\/p>\n

Emerging Technologies and ESG Performance and Tracking<\/span><\/h2>\n

To meet customer demands for knowledge, manufacturers are adding more product information into codes \u2013 for example, Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) factors \u2013 that measure a company and its products\u2019 sustainability. The coding shows where a product came from, whether it was ethically sourced and made, the environmental effects of the production, what its origins are, and so on. Embedding codes into materials and components helps with recycling at the end-of-life phase. In this way, we can track the entire lifecycle of materials \u2013 a product, a component \u2013 from raw material to manufacturing to the consumer to the product\u2019s recycling, while tracking its identity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Automating and Digitizing Material and Production Data<\/span><\/h2>\n

Managing material handling and warehousing operations while also meeting customer expectations can prove to be difficult. Manufacturers need <\/span>real-time visibility<\/span><\/a> into material flows and <\/span>digital automation techniques<\/span><\/a> to be successful. Automating data collection, warehousing and shop floor instructions can actually lead to inventory reductions and more effective material flow.<\/span><\/p>\n

These challenges prompted us to develop a key solution of the QAD Adaptive Applications portfolio. <\/span>QAD Automation Solutions<\/span><\/a> gives manufacturers the tools, including barcodes, to automate and digitize the capture of material and production data and print labels according to manufacturer, supplier or customer formats. This unified form of labeled communication improves material handling effectiveness while meeting global barcode standards and serialization requirements. Some of the benefits of an automated data management system include reduced labor, less downtime and greater<\/span> inventory accuracy<\/span><\/a>. QAD Automation Solutions promotes a real-time view of where items are located that wasn\u2019t possible in the manual world.<\/span><\/p>\n

If only Samuel Morse had known how his simple Morse code would lead to the full traceability potential of material as it flows through the manufacturing process from raw material to recycling and the innovative technologies that would follow.<\/span>[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”9428″ img_size=”full”][vc_column_text]In today\u2019s world of emerging technologies, Morse code can seem like a long-forgotten form of communication. But did you know that the Capitol Records building in Los Angeles, California uses Morse code to send out an ongoing message? According to Wikipedia,\u00a0\u201cThe blinking light atop the tower spells out the word “Hollywood” in Morse […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":9428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[182,197],"tags":[1615,6,1612,1565,601,1623,1036,1613,1614,1620,636,1617,1616,1621,1622,1618,1619,595],"class_list":["post-9427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-innovation-and-technology","tag-april-27","tag-automation","tag-barcode","tag-barcoding","tag-digitization","tag-inventory-systems","tag-material-handling","tag-morse-code","tag-morse-code-day","tag-norman-joseph-woodland","tag-qad-automation-solutions","tag-qr-code","tag-quick-read-code","tag-samuel-morse","tag-telegraph","tag-universal-product-code","tag-upc","tag-warehousing"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Evolution of Barcode Systems: From Morse Code to 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He also builds software-controlled devices and has a large collection of metal cast puzzles.","url":"https:\/\/www.qad.com\/blog\/author\/tww"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9427"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.qad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9430,"href":"https:\/\/www.qad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9427\/revisions\/9430"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}