Cognitive Labs

Yesterday was the birthday of the barcode, originally conceived as a bullseye pattern rather than vertical lines of varied width. (This bullseye pattern was later used in the small package industry as Maxicode or UPScode) and deployed at the CACHE hub or Chicago Area Consolidation Hub in the 1990's by UPS, which at the time was the largest and most sophisticated package sorting facility in the world, designed to serve midwest manufacturing and the industrial heartland of the U.S. including automotive suppliers.

Data was captured using Dick Tracy-like wrist and ring scanners. (Keep in mind that the state of the art at the time was pen and 'gun' laser scanning devices by companies like Symbol Technologies and Telxon; as well as L-Tron and Zebra Technologies, manufacturer of the all-important laser thermal label printers accompanying PC-based shipping systems, encoding all of the package information in the barcode; oftentimes this data was sent ahead of time using proprietary data configurations as well as ANSI X12 and EDIFACT(UN) EDI standards, plus XML; creating a kind of symbiosis between the dataflow and the printed label.