Barcode

The starting point for the development of machine reading was man’s desire to construct an eye for his super fast computer. It was in the 50s that the breakthrough came: machine-reading developers in the USA succeeded for the first time in exceeding the speed at which we are able to say letters out loud. Numbers were no longer typed in, but recognized by a magnetic ink character reader (MICR) and evaluated. The font that was developed especially for this purpose is known as E 13 B.

Optical reading came slightly later and was first put to commercial use round 1960 at IBM. This system was indeed capable of reading only numbers and a few special characters, but it could already process 400 characters/s, and consequently set a development process rolling that helped machine reading to achieve widespread usage at the beginning of the 70s. Today, we have optical readers that recognize all types of typewriter and printing types, even handwritten block capitals, and evaluate them. And they are also capable of processing up to 3,000 characters/s. The expositions that follow look into the significance of printing inks in this field and provide a description not only of machine-readable printing inks, but also of those inks that carry background information for the user, without “addressing” the reading machines.

Bar code readers for goods identification

The above description of optical character readers shows us just how complex the technology for machine reading numbers actually is. In contrast, it is relatively simple to read a number that is in the form of a sequence of bars by optoelectronic means and to pass it on to the data processing system. This is why article numbers used to identify goods are depicted as a combination of bars in the European Article Number (EAN) and American Universal Product Code (UPC) systems. The optical reading system uses an HeNe laser as its light source. This laser emits red light with a wavelength of 633 nm. During scanning, the light/dark sequence is picked up by a photodiode and converted to an electrical pulse group.

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