IUID Blog

Fads come and go. Those that have “staying power” become trends that inevitably provide benefit to organizations or society as a whole. Bar code, now 50 years old and counting, is well beyond a fad. The benefit of bar code has often been to enable “visibility” of items or people. These important things are tracked and accounted for, automatically. (Read More)

Yesterday at A2B headquarters we celebrated the 50th bar code anniversary with Rhode Island Senators Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse and RI Congressman Cicilline and Governor Chafee. The Congressman presented our very own A2B Tracking Chairman, David Collins, with a congressional citation congratulating him for being the “father of the bar code industry.” For more information on the history of the bar code, visit The Changes Bar Code has brought to Worldwide Commerce blog post.  (Read More)

Imagine the world before bar code. A2B will soon host an Open House to celebrate the 50th anniversary of bar code scanning. That milestone makes me reflect on the changes that bar code has brought. In 1961, when the first test scan occurred on a Boston & Maine railcar, computers were being used to perform rudimentary accounting and operational functions in both industry and the military. Punch cards were used to communicate between those computers and their users – a slow and expensive process. Data was key-entered, which made it highly prone to error.  (Read More)

When someone asked me, “How was AIM Expo?” I immediately replied, “It was like getting the band back together.” This kind of attendance from veteran auto ID professionals and practitioners is exactly what the rebirth of this industry event needed. There was a level of excitement that I hadn’t seen at an auto ID conference in years. (Read More)

The world witnessed some of the earliest benefits of automated data capture technology in the form of bar code back in the 60’s.  Huge railroad cars would meander back and forth across the country with valuable contents that would be periodically misplaced while in transit.  Imagine a yard full of hundreds of railroad cars that look exactly alike and trying to find valuable contents such as a million dollars worth of equipment that must be routed to the correct destination. (Read More)

Milan, Italy plays host to ID World, a strong, international annual ID industry event. This huge conference brings together professionals from the following AIT technologies and disciplines: bar code, RFID, biometrics, and smart cards.  Subjects ranged from securing personnel identity and payments over the Internet to tracking critical assets using global ID standards. (Read More)