Emerging Technologies in STC

We learn something new everyday. We learn about miscellaneous stuff all the time. In regards to the grad reading assignment of pages 107-172 Everything is Miscellaneous , I was super intrigued about how the Universal Product Code (UPC) / bar code came to be. Here is a quick history lesson . . .

"In 1948, two graduate students at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia overheard the president of a local grocery chain asking a dean to sponsor research into how to read product information automatically. The students, Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver . . . came up with a set of straight lines . . . and in 1951 they unveiled a machine that could translate the bar codes back into numbers. . . . In 1966--four year after Silver died, at the age of thirty-eight--the idea went commercial when the National Association of Food Chains put out a call for automatic checkout machines to speed up checkout lines. . . . So the association established the Uniform Grocery Product Code, the grandparent of the Universal Product Code . . . In 1981, the U.S. Department of Defense required bar codes on all products it purchased and the UPC went mainstream. Today there are about five million items scanned every day, in more than 140 countries." (Weinberger, 2007, p. 107-108)

I never knew the history of bar codes until I read the chapter in Everything is Miscellaneous. I guess I always thought that UPC's were "always" around. Oh the things you learn! Oh the things you pass on to others that you learn . . . like what I'm doing right now. I hope I'm doing well in my third week as "Professor Nguyen" and hope you are loving learning.