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Barcode Posts
Last week’s big birthday was …..
November 19th, 2009
The barcode.
It killed off the traditional shop and gave us the checkout girl. Beep. Beep. Beep
Last week saw the 57th birthday of the barcode.
Yes – I know it’s unbelievably nerdy to say it but it’s a fascinating fact.
On the 438th anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto, what would have been Heinrich Himmler’s 109th birthday, it’s the glorious 57th birthday of the barcode that we know about.
And the reason we know about it is that Google decided to commemorate it in its ‘doodle’ du jour. That’s how we find out things now. Once, it was the Church calendar that told us; Whitsuntide, Ash Wednesday or Michaelmas. Then it was the newspapers and we all new what the headlines were. Then it was TV, and we all knew when we’d find out who had shot JR. But now it’s some Korean kid in Silicon Valley who decided to tell us when to commemorate in a search engine logo doodle.
And so 8 billion people or so last week logged on to their computers and saw a barcode where ‘Google’ normally is and thought ‘Eh? What’s that? Oh, it must be the anniversary of the barcode…’
Ok – so when did we think it was invented? 1970 – ish maybe? Mid 1960’s at a push? And we were astounded, to find, when we clicked for more information, that it was invented in 1952.
1952! George VI was still alive! And virtually no-one had TV’s let alone barcode scanners. In England we were still driving geese to market but in the US they had developed the barcode.
So – what has it achieved? It’s brought an end to the old fashioned scenario in one’s local shop, where the little man in the white overalls takes the flour tin off the shelf to weigh it out. ‘Baking today Mrs Jones?’
Yup – the barcode certainly killed the shop.
Swipe, swipe blip. Swipe, swipe blip. There are now supermarkets with no checkout staff at all, where you just swipe and blip the barcodes yourself and go home without speaking a word. These are for saddo singletons buying frozen lasagne or soft porn.