If he had followed instructions from his boss, George Laurer might never have succeeded in designing the Universal Product Code. In 1971, a supervisor at International Business Machines Corp. told the ...

Product bar codes were originally developed to help with inventory tracking and speed up checkout at grocery stores. The relative speed and ease of use of the bar code system, or Universal Product ...

Barcode technology makes real-time data collection possible. Despite the multitude of barcodes in existence today, universal product codes remain among the most useful to a small business. Because UPC ...

Paul McEnroe, an award-winning engineer who spent more than two decades in leadership roles at IBM, opens up about the Universal Product Code’s development and the misconception that persists. McEnroe ...

Beep! The barcode, that rectangle of thick and thin parallel lines seen on seemingly every grocery product, package, prescription bottle and piece of luggage is turning 50 years old. Almost as old is ...

The first modern barcode was scanned 50 years ago this summer—on a 10-pack of chewing gum in a grocery store in Troy, Ohio. Fifty is ancient for most technologies, but barcodes are still going strong.