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One Leg Up With Paul McEnroe and His Invention of The Barcode 8-7-23 · OneLegUpAlex Media

0:02
Here's your host, Alex Garrett and inside the Alex Garrett Podcast Network today,
0:09
I wanted to say, firstly, thanks to the Islanders and Vascardi for allowing
0:14
Jake, April and I to be on the mic for that big event,
0:17
and you can find that in the links below. Again, but after seeing
0:21
Oppenheimer, I'm very excited to develop more and go deeper into that research and
0:26
maybe get the author the movie Oppenheimer's based on. I've also reached out to
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see if Christopher Nolan would want to come on. You know, Nolan did
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The Batman, he did all these other incredible things, but this one took
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a lot of research, took a lot of different twists and turns, I'm
0:44
sure, and making the movie and as much as the Life of Jay Robert
0:48
Oppenheimer took and on his way to developing the A bomb and actually dropping the
0:53
A Bomb. And I want to get Christopher on my own show to discuss
0:57
that. We'll see if that happens. But a little by little I'm start
1:00
researching this more. It's one of those niche things, the Life of Jay
1:04
Robert Oppenheimer, that I'm kind of interested in, the man and the godfather
1:08
of one of the biggest moments in American history, the dropic of the Adam
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Bomb, which happened on August nineteen forty five. But right now I want
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to turn into my conversation with one Paul McEnroe because he was the godfather of
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the Barcode and maybe someone say the father of the Barcode, and he wrote
1:33
about the Barcode and it's fifty years of really changing the lives of shoppers everywhere.
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We did get into it right now on the Alex Garrett podcast Network.
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Thanks for joining, and you actually have a book called The Barcode coming out
1:49
to celebrate fifty years of this incredible invention. That's right, So thanks for
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joining, and tell us why you wrote the oka and how did you guys
2:00
develop the Barcode? Sure the we I wrote the book because of several reasons.
2:12
One of them, I kind of have been encouraged by my family and
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everything to document all the stuff that we did and that I had done in
2:19
my life and so on and so forth, including you know, personal things
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and so on. And I did write quite a long book, and I
2:30
was writing about a lot of stuff and family members read it and everything,
2:34
and they said, hey, the barcodes is the thing that really everybody's interested
2:39
in, and it hasn't been documented before in any accurate or long detailed account.
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I want, maybe not long, but detailed account that showed how it
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was developed, how it was created. There have been a few writings that
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tell about how it was supported by the supermarket industry and how they worked to
3:06
get the best barcode chosen and to set it up as a standard, and
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then how they worked to incorporate into their business models. But in terms of
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a technical development, there's pretty much a devoid of anything that has been written.
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In fact, there's quite a lot that's been written that's not accurate guessing
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at what was done. And so that's kind of why we rather rather why
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I talked to the family and I said, Okay, we're going to take
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all that personal stuff, or a lot most of the personal stuff out of
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the book, but take other stuff that I did out of the book and
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just really concentrate on the barcode, how it came to be, how we
3:53
put together a team, how the team developed the barcode and interacted with each
3:59
other, and how we did it within a big, complex corporation instead of
4:03
in a small spartapp fifty years later, Paul mcronon, do you think we
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take the barcode for granted, meaning do we think, oh, it's just
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a simple scan with a low red light. I mean, is there a
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lot more to it that maybe the average person at your supermarket today doesn't realize.
4:18
Okay, well, this took a lot to make sure the red light
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and the barcode all all clicked, if you will, absolutely, I mean,
4:27
that's exactly correct. It was. It was more of a systems designed
4:32
than anything else. And I'll just point out a few of the system's components.
4:38
For example, you start off with the scanner. There was no light
4:44
source that was good enough and precise enough to be able to eliminate the image
4:49
and then have a scanner read that image so carefully, so correctly that it
4:58
didn't make very many errors. If it made very many errors, it was
5:01
not going to succeed. And early on, the bar codes were printed by
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cheap instore printers that several of which every supermarket had to have, and every
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retail store that used the optical bars, and you know, that was very
5:23
hard to come up with a code that could be printed finally enough to be
5:27
read even though there would be some blurs in the printing of it by inexpensive
5:32
printers, because it was three or four years for that to get going.
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So point number one is if you know, before we got to the point
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where Nibisco and product from Gamble and all these kind of people were printing codes
5:46
on the packages which are high quality, before that, the system would have
5:51
died and it would have never gotten on first base. So that's one.
5:56
The second thing was the checkstand. Before that, it was this big,
6:00
old, heavy cash register that NCR had been building. It wasn't too different
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from the way it was in the eighteen eighties when they started out, you
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know, almost one hundred years before, and it was very hard to change
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that. But we came to the semiconductor age and put very lightweight, low
6:18
cost technology in to analyze what was being scanned and to then create a signal
6:28
to send it back to the back room of the store. Well, how
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do you send it now? You need a whole new communications system to send
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it, and we created a new communication systems and that new communication system was
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later modified. I did that myself, well, with a team of people,
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but I was in charge of that. Years later, we created a
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thing called the token ring, which along with Ethernet, did almost one hundred
6:55
percent between the two of them of the communications in the world. So communications
6:59
was a big factor. The storage in the computer in the back room and
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the quick ability to look up information and send it. In Europe up to
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forty checkstands at the same time, fast enough that the person at each checkstand
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would get a reply before they could notice that it was taking any time.
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That speed and the density required for that required us to come up with new
7:29
technology, which was by the way used in the Winchester files, which became
7:34
the floppy disk, and that was the same technology. So we created new
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technology and semiconductors in recording, in communications systems, in scanning, in laser
7:48
light, all to put a system together that would make this thing work successfully.
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Paul, I've got to ask you this because I don't know if you
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noticed this. If a barcode does not work for some reason, you know,
8:01
they had to stand there and type in the serial number. Did you
8:05
notice that impact early on? Like wow, then on the type of the
8:09
serial number anymore? Well? Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know,
8:13
before the barcode, they had to type in the price, you know,
8:18
And in fact I remember I'm an old guy. I'm eighty six years
8:20
old. When I went shopping as a young man before we did the barcode,
8:26
the way in a supermarket to get the cheapest price on a can of
8:28
Campbell's soup was to finger to the back of the shelf and get the first
8:35
can that was put in there, because it had a different staff price on
8:39
it, maybe thirteen cents instead of fifteen cents or seventeen cents on the later
8:43
stop, so they actually had to put that in. It wasn't there was
8:48
no coding of what was sold. The only way they could do inventory control
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was to count what was on the shelf, so they had people walking up
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and down the aisles look at what shelves are empty, and then write that
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down. Of course, when we first came out, if there were scanning
9:07
errors, or if they had systems that didn't work quite as well for one
9:11
reason or another, you know a lot of different companies made systems according to
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our instructions. Because it was all our code. Our code was selected as
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an international standard, and the code has all kinds of protectionism and error correction
9:26
and error detection built into it, so everybody can use that all companies,
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no matter what company builds the supermarket equipment. But if there is a failure,
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we did want the numbers printed on the code, and those numbers are
9:39
on there. So the checkstand operator, now if they can't read the code,
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let's say it's been destroyed, it's been torn or the ink jomp ink
9:48
blot on it or something, then they can key the number in and then
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it will look that item up. That's right. Wow, Well, let
9:56
me ask you this thing. Does that? Does your memoir of the barcode
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include advice for twenty twenty three companies that are just you know, not only
10:03
trying to survive this post pandemic in all this technological advancement, is there advice
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for those in twenty twenty three? You know, it's going to be We've
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been at it fifty years, but it's going to be a long time before
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they get to anything in high volume. I mean the volume you're talking about,
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like the ten billion or so per day that are scanned and printed around
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the world. You know, because the QR codes are they're not going to
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get to those kind of numbers because there are not that many applications that require
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the greater expense and complication of reading that require that extra amount of data.
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The bar code like we did is you know, just got like a dozen
10:45
characters and a numerica at that, but that will get nine percent of the
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job's done. And that's why it has such high volume and it's easy to
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read and it's almost fool proof. Did you say some Universe to this day,
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bigger pardon, did you say that some Universe barcodes are universal to this
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very day? Oh? Yeah, I think that. I think they are
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universal. You know, it's the same barcode used all around the world.
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It's used in China and India and Mongolia and South Africa and Argentine. It's
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everywhere, and it's the it's the same one that we submitted. You know.
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We've worked on the development of it in nineteen sixty nine and seventy and
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seventy one, and I actually included in my book as an appendix technical detailed
11:39
report that I had published in nineteen seventy one that tells exactly how it worked
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and why it would be very reliable and be very easy to read even when
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it was wrinkled or you know, scratched or whatever. And so that's a
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document that the document itself is h was printed two years before the Barcode was
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selected A seventy three, which was fifty years ago, so it's fifty I
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mean fifty years ago, so that's it was fifty two years ago we wrote
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this that I wrote that document, which is just an appendix in the book
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for technical people that are interested in the history. Well, what were the
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You know, every startup has a challenge, So what were the challenges to
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getting the barcode literally up and running UH for companies only small, but then
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as it got, as it grew, as you grew the barcode, well,
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there were lots and lots of those challenges. The first store that we
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were trying to open it was a giant store in UH in Tyson's Corner,
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Virginia, and I sent my top engineer up there to be there when we
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opened the store, and I was waiting for his call to say everything worked
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fine. And he called me up and said, hey, Paul, guess
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what the store couldn't even know? And I thought, what what could have
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gone wrong? And I found out that there was a negative reaction by unions
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that they were worried that the people who were the checkout clerks would be deprived
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of jobs or that they would go down, and so they picketed the store.
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The next things that happened that that went away. Later on they realized
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that it was the complex and the faster and it would actually create more jobs.
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Then people were worried, were worried that the laser would ruin people's eyesight.
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And I had to, you know, hire Stanford Research Institute to do
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the original studies on the safety of safety of lasers when looked at by people,
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and that took a long time, and we did that and contributed to
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the base knowledge of laser light. And it was the first use of the
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laser in themercial operations, not counting not counting the construction industry. And then
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then a lot of states passed laws against it. Eighteen states passed laws against
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the use of the bar code. Some of them, like California just said,
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well, we won't pass a law against it per se. But if
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you take the price off, if you put a barcode on the merchandise,
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you have to put a price code on well, I mean put the price
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on as well. Well. If you have to put the price on,
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you don't gain the advantage the economy of taking the price off the merchandise,
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so therefore it's not worth being used. So then I kind of became a
14:46
lobbyist for about six months, traveled around the country to different states, trying
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to convince them that, you know, this was not going to ruin the
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activity in that way by Congress or how well. There were different states,
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so the state house, you know, I remember I visited Montana, visited
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California, and sixteen other states passed laws that either made it h price performance
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not effective because they required only those companies that would put bark, that would
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put scanners scanning systems in their stores to put the price on and they couldn't
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afford to do both of those, so that was effectively shutting it down.
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But we visited the legislative states, the legislatures in those states and talk them
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out of you know, passing those laws or if they had the law,
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like in California, they passed a law like that, but they said,
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well, at the end of this next year, if it if there's not
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any problems, the law will phase out. If there are problems, we'll
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renew it, and they let it phase out. I was back in nineteen
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seventy four, seventy five. Wow. Uh, Paul, I've got to
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ask you this. He mentioned that the way they did the pricing and all
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that, and the way they could scan the prices. At what point did
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did they realize, hey, we could scan an item more than once if
16:15
a customers buying more than one of the same item. Well, I think
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that was known right at the beginning. Yeah. We uh, we worked
16:29
very closely with the Supermarket Institute. The Supermarket Institute hired McKenzie and company to
16:34
make the selection of the code, and we discussed in gory detail the different
16:41
ways to use the code most effectively, such as the question you just asked,
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and so that was pretty well known right at the beginning. I find
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it interesting it's like, oh, yeah, we'll just do it more than
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once. Even now in self checkout you could do it. And that's another
16:56
evolution is that people are able to do is by themselves, not really rely
17:00
on a cashier. Did you ever see that being a thing self checkout?
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No, you caught us there. You're correct. We did not see that
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as coming to be as relevant as it has been. I did not see
17:15
that one coming. We did realize they could scan multiple items, and for
17:22
example, one of the individual items that I worked on and have the patent
17:27
on. We don't have the patent on the code because you couldn't put a
17:30
patent on the code, but you can put patent on equipment that scans the
17:33
code. And I had the original patent on the thing that you hold in
17:38
your hand. It looks like it's a pistol grip scanner and you grab it.
17:42
That people, particularly at Costco, but all the grocery stores use it.
17:47
And they pointed from the other where the checkstand where the checker is on
17:52
their side of the checkstand, and they aim it in your cart so you
17:55
don't have to lift heavy items out like bottles of water or a battery or
17:59
something like that. Heavy battery. You know, you've probably seen that at
18:03
Costco. So they just they can shoot it from a distance. And you
18:07
know, we saw that and we saw the need for that, but we
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did not see so much of the customer doing their own checkout and scanning.
18:17
We thought there would be too much of a problem of of people putting stuff
18:25
in their basket without you know, to take home, without scanning it at
18:29
all. It wasn't they couldn't scan We didn't think that they would be you
18:33
know, able to the stores would put up with the risk of people stealing
18:38
items, and they do. Most of the places that I have gone,
18:42
they do have sort of a supervisor walking around or super supervisarial person walking around
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keeping an eye on the self scanned items, self scanned registers. They have
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them at the Albertson I personally go to. I'm we didn't see that shoplifting
19:00
and that because obviously the barcode and the sensors leaving the store have to interact,
19:04
right, Oh yeah, yeah, you have to point a light at
19:10
it and scan it in order for it to read that's right. And so
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does the fact that these barcodes still don't and I had to say it like
19:18
this, but they don't really prevent people from shoplifting and stores aren't doing much
19:22
at someone who helped create the barcode, Does it frustrate you, let shoplifting
19:26
is up. Yeah, we realized that it wouldn't do that because with a
19:33
real simple, inexpensive barcode, you know that somebody just puts on like in
19:38
the process of I mentioned the BISCO before. So when the BISCO or Post
19:44
company or whatever, when they print on the package, they're going to print
19:48
something on the package anyway. So except for figuring out what the print and
19:52
keeping track of it, there's no extra cost in printing it on the package.
19:56
And for that reason, you know, well with with a thing like
20:00
that that has no cost in it extra cost, I don't know any way
20:06
that you can automatically have it checked and when they carry it out. Now,
20:10
what technology you can use for that is, for example, RFID,
20:15
which is a technology which is has a you know, the capability of being
20:22
read by magnetic sensors that can see through covers of paper or cloth or whatever.
20:30
And if you carry those out through a doorway that has a magnetic reader
20:38
on it, such as you go through when you go through an airport check
20:41
thing, then you can tell that they're taking something out, and you could
20:45
program it so that it would know that it hadn't it had or it had
20:48
not been paid for. And you've seen those in shopping. You see some
20:53
items that they have to treat or else if you walk out the door or
21:00
it'll light up. But they only use those on more expensive items. You
21:03
can't afford to do that on items that cost less than a dollar because there
21:11
is a cost that's uh you know, considerable to the RFID magnetic thing itself,
21:18
which you have to let go with the customer because when they walk out
21:22
the door, they're going to keep it. But the Paul, have you
21:26
seen the barcode actually helped put law enforcement track down shoplifters or any kind of
21:32
criminal at that Well, I don't think that that's one of the major characteristics
21:37
of it that it has helped in that way, But if they did,
21:44
you know, if you wanted to prove that something came from somewhere or that
21:48
sort of thing, which has probably happened in court cases, then you could
21:52
do that if you had the barcode. You know, you could take the
21:55
barcode and scan it and or take it back to the store that where it
22:00
was bought, and or you could find out what story it was bought at
22:03
if you had the right analysis, and they could tell you everything about it
22:08
which might position the criminal at that place and so on and so forth.
22:14
So I think I can see it helping in a trial and so on,
22:17
but probably not going to help them find the person in the first place.
22:21
But the magnetic things RFID in coding it could do that, But that's a
22:26
that's a little different. That's a different technology. Well, I know you
22:30
wrote the book about creating the barcode. And then after you did all that
22:33
and you left, you know, IBM after twenty four years and moved on
22:37
to different things. You became a cowboy. Well, you know, I
22:38
know that's part of your You're a stick Now you're a cowboy as well.
22:42
Yeah, I kind of am. I had. I had been told stories
22:48
about you know, the wild West and horses and everything by my dad when
22:52
I was growing up, and I always wanted to do that. But I
22:56
grew up in a you know, Ohile, in a place and in an
23:03
area and at an economic level where that wasn't feasible, and so I didn't
23:10
decide after college to move west. That's how I joined IBM. I was
23:15
I was living in grew up in Dayton, Ohio. I joined u IBM
23:21
in California, And when I started raising a family, I bought my kids
23:26
ponies, and then I got myself a horse, and I have become a
23:32
cowboy. I now have a ranch and I was honored to be named the
23:36
Vaccaro of the Year this year by my local community, which is Vacaro is
23:44
a Spanish word for a special kind of a cowboy who was very good with
23:48
a horse and so on and so forth, and so I've really enjoyed that.
23:52
And I'm a rancher now. And when I retired from electronics and computers
24:00
and all that, I became a rancher and I got into that one hundred
24:06
percent. And I was the president of local cattleman's association and a director of
24:11
the state organization at California Cattleman's Association and so on. And I've also been
24:15
involved in other nonprofits. But the cowboy thing has always been dear to my
24:21
heart and dear to the heart of those in my family too. All right,
24:25
So in the process of making the barcode fifty years ago, what was
24:30
that sorta did you get involved with that? As well as like an escape
24:33
from Hey, we're in the lab. I gotta get out of here and
24:34
into the farmland if you will, or the fields if you will. Well,
24:37
I didn't do it, yeah, in my spare time. And I
24:42
don't know. Maybe you've heard the phrase that IBM means I've been moved,
24:45
and that's a joke, but it's kind of true. And when they moved
24:49
me around, they had to move me and my family, and I remember
24:53
one time they had to move nine horses from North Carolina to New York and
24:59
back again, and they did give him credit for that. So, yeah,
25:04
that's true. When you go to a shopping market or grocery store,
25:08
even convenience store, and you see the evolution of what you created, does
25:14
that do something to you? Does that make you feel rewarded? Does that
25:15
make you feel a kind of way that Hey, my barcode and the way
25:19
what I invented and wrote about is still being used and now look how much
25:25
more involved it is. What does that make you feel like? Yeah,
25:27
it makes me feel really good. And you know, I am I do
25:32
the shopping for the family now, I'm eighty six years old, and I
25:37
like to help the family, my wife out with that. And I go
25:40
there and uh i've i've I go to an Albertson store in the little town
25:45
I live in, and uh i've i've met and talked with the manager of
25:52
the store, a fellow named Armando, And you know, we talked about
25:57
it, and he had his his boss coming to town one day, who
26:02
did a lot of Albertson's stores in southern California, and we talked and I
26:06
told him, gave him a few clues about how to set up the scanners
26:11
a little bit more efficiently and so on and so forth, and I chat
26:18
with him about that. But I do feel really good about it. I
26:21
think that it's very important for people who are development people, engineers, technologists
26:26
and that sort of thing, that are developing things that developed things that are
26:30
important for society. For IBM, the barcode. One of the people that
26:37
reviewed my book said, yeah, he was with IBM. I asked an
26:41
experienced IBM guy to do this, and he said, yeah. The barcode
26:45
wasn't the most profitable thing for IBM. I think they did well with it
26:48
because they manufactured them, and we went from zero percentage of the business of
26:53
providing equipment to supermarkets and retail stores to about seventy five or seventy eight percent
27:00
of it, so we went from almost we went from dead zero to a
27:04
great majority and to being the leading supplier. And so they did well.
27:10
But it wasn't like selling base computers and storage and clouds and all that kind
27:15
of stuff. So he pointed out that when I was making these arguments to
27:21
IBM that we needed to do it, one of My arguments was, it's
27:25
going to really benefit society. It's going to benefit the computer, the consumer,
27:30
and it's going to allow consumers to buy things less expensively and more effectively
27:37
and open up a lot of opportunities. Think of Amazon without barcodes, you
27:41
know they got they probably scanned six or eight barcodes before they sell every item.
27:47
It has to tell them which line to go down, and what price
27:51
to charge, and what their inventory is and when they need to order more
27:56
and where they're going to send it. They used barcodes for all of that.
28:00
I'm going to talk about growth because I'm starting to think that you know,
28:02
change like Albertson that actually merge with other supermarkets. Those mergers probably were
28:07
possible because the barcode made it easier for business, right, and those helped
28:11
the merging absolutely, absolutely yes, because see they can work out of bigger
28:17
warehouses and everything. So you know, every time you buy one little item,
28:21
I mean a toothbrush, and even in a supermarket or if you buy
28:25
a you know, a box of cereal, automatically a thousand miles away in
28:33
some warehouse, there is a tick made that tells them that, okay,
28:38
they've now sold three hundred and forty three of these and that supermarket, and
28:45
now their inventory is low enough, you got to put some more on the
28:48
back room and send it on a truck and get it out there because they're
28:51
gonna need more. That's automatic. And so all stores use it, and
28:56
they use it the same way, and they have similar programs with a little
29:00
bit different advertising. But yes, it makes that much more feasible than it
29:04
would otherwise be Paul, I think you've heard the age old question, and
29:10
the old age old thing is that, well, the robots and all the
29:12
technology is replacing the humans. Isn't that a mistake? Though? I mean,
29:17
don't humans still have to be able to help the regular customer deal with
29:21
the barcode if there is an issue and whatnot. Yeah, no, I
29:25
totally believe that. Yeah, you know it just it requires you to be
29:30
a little more sophisticated so that you can decide where you need to put the
29:37
barcode and what you need to have the barcode do, and how you can
29:41
use it more effectively. But it's people that are going to decide that,
29:45
not barcodes, not computers, and in fact, I think even not Ai.
29:49
I mean we're getting into this new AI world that you hear of almost
29:55
every day, and it's going to be very powerful, but there's always going
30:00
to be the need for the human mind. You know, the computers don't
30:03
have a mind. They can just do things very fast and very repetitively.
30:07
Repetitively, and the barcode is one of those examples where it allows the computer
30:14
to see, oh, we sold this, therefore we need to do that.
30:18
But the barcode just tells the computer what was sold, and then a
30:22
programmer, a human being has to go in and say, okay, when
30:26
that happens, here's what we want to do, and then he tells the
30:30
computer how to effectively organize that. So the person is always involved, and
30:36
I think that's something, as you point out, we don't want to lose
30:40
sight of. Well, Paul, I've got to ask you this because I
30:44
know you went from flying you know with Boeing to the you know IBM,
30:49
that journey, that experience in the aviation world help you develop the barcode.
30:56
Yeah, you know my experience and Boeing was working on the SAM missile,
31:07
which they were doing at the time, and it's just it's just different technology.
31:11
I was that was a great program. I was very interested in it,
31:15
but I really was more interested in working on things that were more directly
31:22
usable by people in their everyday lives. And so that was in my nine
31:30
years with IBM. Before I got to the Barcood, I said, I
31:33
worked in scanners, but I also worked in communication systems for schools and where
31:41
we put we didn't have computers yet, this is long before the PC.
31:45
But we built little keyboards and screen displays and buttons to push and so on
31:52
so that teachers could interact with students. And we built fax machines, and
31:56
we built printers, and we built little scanners and all this human computer interaction
32:04
devices. And that was what I spent those nine years doing. And the
32:07
Barcode really is human computer interaction. It's happening in a store in a retail
32:14
environment, but it is that consumer interaction. And that's the thing that I
32:20
thought was very important because it gives the engineer such as myself, an opportunity
32:25
to make people's lives easier and it helps you, uh, you know,
32:30
that's that's nice that we can do that, and I think that's one of
32:35
the most rewarding things that an engineer can do, is make life better in
32:43
some ways for for other people. And the more people, the better,
32:46
and the barcodes one of those that reaches you know, as many people as
32:52
you can imagine. Well, it's definitely one of the most impactful items,
32:58
the most impactful creations for all of us here, Paul, And of course
33:02
we love that you've been able to talk with us about this. But in
33:06
your book The Barcode, any favorite stories you write about that we should be
33:10
looking on the lookout for in your book? Uh? Yeah, there are
33:16
a lot of stories in the book because uh, you know, a lot
33:22
of things happened, a lot of things were were great fun and uh so
33:27
on. It's hard to think of which one I should uh you know,
33:31
I should tell you about. There were there, there were many. I'll
33:37
tell you one. I was at the very first store that was installed.
33:42
And by the way, they're saying that the first scan of a barcode was
33:45
done, Uh, it's it's it's said by the Smithsonian, who were called
33:52
in by a national cash register did a barcode scan in a store in Troy,
33:57
Ohio in on June twenty sixth of nineteen seventy four. But even before
34:04
that, we were scanning although not in commercial applications where we sold a system,
34:10
but we were testing systems. And I went to the first system's test
34:15
in Montreal, Canada, and it was at a Steinway store up there,
34:22
and I was in the store watching the operations. So we gave them equipment.
34:28
I say gave it to them because we were just testing it, so
34:30
we hadn't been sold yet, and they were using it, and they had
34:37
printers in the store that we're marking the items, inexpensive printers that I referred
34:42
to earlier in the conversation. And it turns out that the Canadian government,
34:49
hearing about this, and we had invited them, sent a representative there to
34:53
see what it was going to be like to have this barcode system scanning in
34:59
one of their store. So the Canadian official was there and I met him
35:04
and talked to him and so on, and he decided to start interviewing people
35:07
about this. And it was when I was at the store and he stopped
35:14
an elderly lady who was walking with a cane and she had just checked out
35:21
of the store, and he stopped her at the at the at the front
35:24
door of the store and he said, man, may I ask you a
35:28
couple of questions that I'm so and so from the Canadian government, and she
35:31
said yes. And he said, does it upset you that you have this
35:37
fancy system here and there's no longer prices on the merchandise because the prices have
35:44
been removed, so you can only read it on the shelf. You can't
35:49
see it on the can And she says, oh no. She says,
35:54
a matter of fact, I really like this because I like to get the
36:00
cheapest price that I can get an elderly lady. And I can't, you
36:06
know, I don't have a lot of money for me to get the best
36:09
price. And she says, so, now I can take this slip,
36:14
and she pulled out the check slip that he had printed out from the printer
36:17
in this IBM system that we had just put in the store, and of
36:22
course it gives a list of all the items that she bought and what the
36:24
price was. And she says, with this list, I walked down the
36:29
street to the next store and see how much the price they have is for
36:34
that item. And she said, now I can do that because I got
36:37
all the items that I bought here listed Before I could never remember how much
36:43
was it can a Campbell soup? Or how much was Wheatie's box or anything.
36:46
I couldn't remember what the price was, and I couldn't do good comparison.
36:51
But now I can shop compare and that's much better. And you know,
36:55
I can still read the price on the shelf, so that didn't le
37:00
me that much. Well, you know that that supervisor from the Canadian government,
37:05
he went back to, uh, you know, the Canadian government headquarters,
37:09
and we never heard a complaint from them again ever. And uh,
37:15
you know, unlike in the IBM, as I said, I mean,
37:19
unlike in the United States, we had all kinds of problems with the government,
37:23
you know, getting in the way of proceeding. But in Canada,
37:29
that particular story I think was instrumental in the Canadian government not raising any issues
37:37
about scanning. Well, Paul, how about this. Your barcode has also
37:40
become like a self price check, meaning there are price checks at every station
37:45
in every store possible. So that also became an evolution from fifty years ago.
37:51
That's right, that's right, And we didn't see that one quite coming
37:53
in our early days either, but that's very true. All right. One
37:58
last thing I remember, remember now, as we're talking, the word barcode
38:01
was actually in culture. I mean it was a movie. Did you get
38:05
to see the movie in twenty sixteen? Did you want to weigh in on
38:08
that. Actually, I didn't even know about that. I didn't know there
38:13
was a movie by the name Barcode. I don't remember watching about it.
38:16
I know there was entitled called Barcode. So there you go. I didn't
38:21
know that. That's very interesting. You have to go check that out.
38:24
Well, Paul mckimo, this has been a real pleasure, and I want
38:29
to if you can, I'd love to have you back. And you know,
38:30
because I could you see as simple as the barcode may see him?
38:35
Could you see advancements happening like a couple of years or even a year from
38:38
now that we should talk about on another podcast that you're seeing and maybe even
38:43
you wrote about. You know, I don't think so. I think that
38:47
the QR code will become more common, it'll be used to a greater degree,
38:52
but I think the barcode will continue long past that time. I think
38:57
the volume usage of it will just go up and up, and you know,
39:01
technologies will make it even easier and cheaper to read and we'll just see
39:07
more and more of the similar kinds of applications of it. Well, and
39:10
I only think you saw it coming where we could literally scan our Yankees or
39:14
Mets tickets at the you know, at the reader, because now they have
39:17
a scanner for that too. Look at what this invention the barcodes spun into,
39:21
right. Absolutely, yeah, Paul McEnroe, it's been a joy and
39:27
again love to have you back on. And where can people buy the book?
39:31
You know, it's going to be available at Amazon and in Barnes and
39:37
Noble, and I'm sure there'll be other places. It's not quite out yet,
39:42
so I don't have the details on that, but I know those are
39:45
two that we're committed to. And it will be available as a paperback,
39:50
as an audio book, and it will also be as a hardcover book.
39:55
Well, I would love to see you get your book scanned at the store,
40:00
you know, just as a photo of that'd be kind of fun.
40:02
It'll have a barcode on it. As a matter of fact, the cover
40:06
of the book is one great is a great big barcode. It's got half
40:10
of the top of the front cover is a barcode. And then it kind
40:14
of fades out into the bottom of the book too, so you won't have
40:16
any trouble finding it. And I don't have anybody said this on the press
40:21
tour, but congratulations on fifty years. It's got to feel really accomplished that
40:24
it's been around this long. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate
40:30
that my guests been. Paul mcenroey is the author and I would say the
40:34
lead man who invented the barcode on the Alex Garrett podcast Network.