Automated Identification is almost ubiquitous now, but it is a recent event. As recent as the 1950's, identifying anything was almost always a human task. Vehicles had license plates, rail cars had box car numbers, ships had names, and aircraft had tail numbers, but determination of them happened when someone humanly read the identifcation. Then began efforts to automatically record an identifying code on rail cars.

But, by far the most pervasive effort in item identification came when the Grocery retailing and manufacturing industries agreed on a Universal Product Code(UPC) and Symbol, which has become known as the Barcode.

Although not too obvious at the time, this seminal event influenced and has changed almost everything in peoples lives.  It marked the enablement of large scale consumer data collection. 

The IDHistory project will record and document the events that allowed the barcode to happen.  We want you to enjoy and learn from the information presented here.  You are probably free to use any of the information provided here, but we ask that you contact us prior to using it and give credit to the ID History Project as its source. When the information is used on-line would you please link that credit statement back to this site.

grocery store shopping changed from stores resembling this prior to 1973		into scanning stores with much lower checkout profiles by 1976 that looked like this:
grocery store shopping changed from stores resembling this prior to 1973		Into scanning stores with much lower checkout profiles by 1976 that looked like this:
grocery store shopping changed from stores resembling this prior to 1973		into scanning stores with much lower checkout profiles that by 1976 looked like this:
grocery store shopping changed from stores resembling this prior to 1973		into scanning stores with much lower checkout profiles that by 1976 looked like this: