RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK — In 1959, the Research Triangle Park was established. In 1965, IBM announced plans to move operations into the area. And in 1969, Paul McEnroe moved to Raleigh to lead a team of IBM-ers on a new point-of-sale project. It was this team that created the UPC (Universal Product Code), codes we recognize on millions of products and scan billions of times a day.
Earlier this month, Paul McEnroe released a book that tells this story, The Barcode: How a Team Created One of the World’s Most Ubiquitous Technologies.
I spoke with McEnroe about how the project came about, his time in North Carolina, and the impact that this innovation has had in the 50 years since it was created.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
TechWire: I think the number one question I have is whether the barcode on the cover of the book is actually scannable.
Paul McEnroe: No! I told them not to make it that way because think of all the inventory problems we’d have! Scanners would be picking it up all the time and they wouldn’t know what to do with it.
TW: Good thinking.
Can you provide some of the history of how you came to be working on this project and be in North Carolina?
PM: IBM offered me a job in California and that was where I wanted to go, so I took the job. At that particular point in time, IBM, which was, by many measures, the largest company in the world, was worried that the growth curve wasn’t available for them in plain computing anymore. They were beginning to fill up the world of computing if you can believe it. And so they wanted to expand on the periphery of the computing business, that is to say, start new applications that are on the edge of computing and will require more computers to be used.
[They said] “Find somebody in IBM and treat them like they were a startup and help them get a product out the door.” And by my luck, they came to me and asked me to do that. And I got to pick what product area we wanted to go after.
Having grown up in Dayton, Ohio in the shadow of NCR (Global) I saw the opportunity there because they had a 100-year-old product that had 95% of the marketplace in point of sale. I could see in various articles in the field of supermarkets and retail stores that they needed item identification and automatic inventory control and scanning, and scanning was where my experience had been. And so I said, “Yeah, we can come up with a code.”
It wasn’t a big amount of money, $300,000 the first year, a million the second, and 3 million the third year. I started with seven or eight people. And they said, “Please can you go to North Carolina and do this because we have a factory there.”
A year later in 1970, the Supermarket Institute actually formalized the formation of a committee to pick a symbol, and that fit in perfectly to what we were doing. We came up with a symbol, along with 14 other companies, and submitted our symbol in 1973, 50 years. ago this year. It was selected as the international standard.
Of course, we grew the team in the next four or five years. I was full-time at it until 1977.
TW: The UPC code itself was obviously a huge breakthrough. But another important piece was the technology that could read the codes well and then getting that out the door.
PM: Yes, that is one of the major points of my book.
In the early days, the first five, or six years, the barcode was printed in the store on very inexpensive printers. They sometimes had too much ink and they printed bars that were too fat. They sometimes had too little ink and they printed bars that were too thin. They were made by running paper through a printer and the stamp came down. But if the paper still had a little bit of motion, you got a blur at the end of the edge of the line. So all that was happening but we had to be very, very reliable or [the technology] would have failed.
But we did hit that reliability. First of all, the helium-neon laser was invented just before we started; it was a very small laser. People were worried it wasn’t safe. When the IBM engineers heard I wanted to put a laser in the scanner in the supermarket they said no way. [But we] proved, for the first time it had ever been known, that there’s no accumulation danger of laser light in the human eye. Then we also had to have a different communication system to send the signal from the scanners to the back room.
The third thing was all of the technology in magnetic storage. It wasn’t fast enough. It wasn’t big enough so we had both make it faster and bigger. So we went back to something I had seen IBM do a few years before in San Jose, and it was called the Winchester disk technology. This was the backroom controller at the supermarket. And then we had to make something less expensive at the check stand. PCs hadn’t come out yet, this was about a decade before and I couldn’t foresee the PC but what I did foresee was a chip in a box with a keyboard and a display. That basically is a PC, and we did that with integrated circuits, you know where you put many circuits on a chip. It was the first time that integrated circuits had been put in an IBM product and we had 300 circuits per chip. Now they talk about millions and millions of circuits per chip.
That took 10 years to do and we’re very fortunate to have all that happen. It was the system around it that made it work.
TW: Can you talk about the rest of the team and some of the experiences they brought to the project and the creation of the code?
PM: So Joe Woodland, when he was a student at Drexel University, heard about the need for item marking in supermarkets. This is 1948 and he came up with a code. It wasn’t a bar code like ours, it was a code that measured the thickness of bars of circles, concentric circles, and then the thickness of the line next to the circles. And it was it was brilliant, but it didn’t have good reliability. He sold that patent to a company and it eventually ended up in the hands of RCA by the time 20 years had gone by. And in the meantime, [Woodland] had joined IBM in a different capacity.
One day the phone rang in about 1970, and Joe is on the other end. He called me up and said “Hey, I’ve been following your program. I’ve always been interested in the supermarket and I can see the code you have and it’s fantastic and it’s so much better than mine. And I would love to move down and join your team in North Carolina.” And what’s better than to have the guy who invented one of the codes that we’re competing against arguing in favor of your code because it’s so much better? So I said, “Absolutely, Joe come on down.” So he came down and joined the team.
He did a fantastic job of working with the Supermarket Institute and with McKinsey and Company, the consulting firm that the Supermarket Institute had hired. He wrote the instruction booklet, but he did not contribute to nor help create any further Universal Product Code. That is a mistake that is written around the internet, and I explain it more in my book.
TW: Can you talk a bit about what Raleigh and RTP were like back in the early 1970’s?
PM: So when [IBM] said, “Yeah, we’re gonna give you the money but we want you to go to North Carolina to do it,” it was because they had just opened up a laboratory in the Research Triangle and a manufacturing facility about three or four years before about 1965. They bought 600 acres there. You’ve got Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University, in a triangle around the Research Triangle Park. And that was one of the things that IBM always wanted was to have their laboratories where IBM-ers could get continuing education very easily.
Raleigh was about 100,000 people in those days. I had a great deal of difficulty talking people into moving to Raleigh. They lived in upstate New York. Their houses on average in that timeframe were $20,000 to $25,000, and in Raleigh, you had to pay $70,000 to get a really nice house. But you got a really nice house on an acre under trees in a nice subdivision, for $70,000. But they couldn’t afford it. So that was an issue.
And schooling was an issue. They were just changing over to integrated schools. We wanted to put my son into the school system and not go to a private school so he was in the first class that was bussed in North Carolina.
After working on to this program for the first eight years I went away for four years and then came back for four more. And by that time, Raleigh had grown to a quarter million. So it did change, but it was kind of the old Raleigh and the new Raleigh.
TW: Was there a particular point that you recall, when you went into a grocery store or shop and saw how far the UPC had come and what an immense difference it had made?
PM: Yeah, I have a trigger point like that all the time! You know, I mean, I’m eighty-six years old now. One of my main duties is doing the shopping. And one of my personal invention items that has my name on the patent is the gun scanner that you can use to shoot items within the cart, you know, heavy items you don’t want to pick up. So I give the clerks a fun time with shooting that thing around and telling about how it was to design it and so on and so forth.
It does make me think a lot. Driving around in your car to the supermarket and you realize this car and all the parts in it, they had barcodes on them at one point in time. And then they came together and then the whole assembly got a barcode. And then that went into the truck and that became a barcode. It just goes on forever. And then you think about some guy in the middle of China or the Himalayas or somebody in South Africa, they’re all using barcodes. You know, we never thought it would last a long time. I don’t think we ever thought it would go 50 years.
TW: Fifty years and no sign of slowing down.
PM: No, I don’t think so. I mean, the QR code is a great thing. But the simplest, fast, quick, easily understood by everybody, little barcode that identifies every item uniquely in the world – it’s going to be hard to replace that. It’s going to be around for a long time.
BIO: Paul V. McEnroe
Alumnus of Purdue University and Stanford University
Valedictorian at the University of Dayton
IBM for 23 years
Trilogy Systems Corporation, 1984-1992
Co-founder of the McEnroe Reading & Language Arts Clinic at the University of California Santa Barbara, 2011
Honorary Doctorate of Science from California State University and California Polytechnic State University
