Twenty years later 1966, two companies, IBM and NCR, launched the world's first barcode technology application system on the basis of investigating the feasibility of using scanners and computers in store sales settlement. This system records the price of goods on the magnetic stripe of goods packaging. When the goods pass through the scanner, the scanner reads the information on the magnetic stripe.
From 65438 to 0970, the American Grocery Association initiated the establishment of the United States (UCC) Uniform Code Committee. The establishment of UCC marks that the American business community has fully accepted the bar code technology. 1972 UCC organization uses UPC barcode as the unified commodity code for commodity identification, and determines that UPC barcode is widely used as barcode standard in the United States and Canada. This move laid a foundation for the unification and wide application of commodity bar codes in the future.
1973, manufacturers and sellers in Europe 12 countries such as France, Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany and Denmark initiated and established the European article coding system. The European Article Coding Association was established in 1977. EAN Association for short. EAN Association has introduced the commodity barcode compatible with UPC barcode: EAN barcode. As soon as this new thing appeared in Europe, it immediately attracted the interest of manufacturers and sellers in many countries in the world. Many non-European and American countries in the world have also joined the ean Association. 198 1 year, the EuropEAN article coding association was renamed ean international for short. Because of its customary name, it is still called ean organization today.
China established the China Article Coding Association on 1988, and formally joined the EAN organization on 199 1 year. At present, the prefix codes used by commodities in China are 690,691,692,693 assigned to China by EAN international organization.
Because of the advantages of the combination of bar code technology and computer technology, it is not only widely used in the field of commodity circulation, but also widely used in other fields such as posts and telecommunications, banks, libraries, logistics management, and even the most popular supply chain management of e-commerce, production, supply and sales. So there are many bar codes for management, such as 128 bar code, 39 bar code, cross 25 bar code and so on. These barcodes are all one-dimensional barcodes of the management system.
With the expansion of the application field of bar code technology, people's demand for bar code technology is also increasing. People not only require barcode technology to solve the problems of computer data input speed and correctness, but also hope that barcode technology can solve other problems such as printing more information on a smaller area. In the late 1980s, a new bar code came into being, which can express more information in a smaller area, that is, two-dimensional bar code. Because two-dimensional bar codes can represent information both horizontally and vertically, compared with one-dimensional bar codes, the amount of information and information density carried by two-dimensional bar codes have increased several times, and two-dimensional bar codes can represent images, characters and even sounds. The appearance of two-dimensional bar code has changed the bar code technology from simply identifying items to describing items, and its function has undergone a qualitative change, and the application field of bar code technology has also expanded.
Barcode technology, which originated in the 1940s, was studied in the 1960s, applied in the 1970s, popularized in the 1980s and developed in the 1990s, plays an irreplaceable role as a printable computer language. It can be predicted that with the advent of the era of economic globalization and information networking, the application prospect of barcode technology will be bright.