席卷全球的条形码.docVIP

席卷全球的条形码 　　Supermarkets are a risky business. They must stock thousands of products in scores of brands and sizes to sell at painfully small markups1）. Keeping close track of them all， and maintaining inventories neither too large nor too small is critical. Yet for most of this century， as stores got bigger and the profusion2） on the shelves multiplied， the only way to find out what was on hand was by shutting the place down and counting every can， bag， and parcel. This expensive and inefficient job was usually done no more than once a month ... Thus， long before barcodes and scanners3） were actually invented， grocers knew they desperately needed something like them. 　　The first step toward todays barcodes came in 1948， when Bernard Silver， a graduate student， overheard a conversation in the halls of Philadelphias Drexel Institute of Technology. The president of a food chain was pleading with one of the deans to undertake a research on capturing product information automatically at checkout. The dean turned down the request， but Silver mentioned the conversation to his friend Norman Joseph Woodland， a 27-year-old graduate student and teacher at Drexel. The problem fascinated Woodland. 　　After several months of hard work Woodland came up with the linear barcode， using elements from two established technologies： movie soundtracks and Morse code4）. I just extended the dots and dashes downwards and made narrow lines and wide lines out of them. 　　Woodland took his idea back to Drexel， where he began putting together a patent5） application. He decided to replace his wide and narrow lines with concentric circles， so that they could be scanned from any direction. This became known as the bulls-eye code. Meanwhile， Silver investigated what form the codes should ultimately take. The two filed a patent application on October 20， 1949. 　　In October 1952， their patent was granted. IBM， where Woodland worked at the time， offered a couple of times to buy the patent， but for m