Happy 35th Birthday, You Old Bar Code

I read the other day that Google will be developing an operating system for PCs tied to its Chrome Web browser.

It seemed to be pretty big news. And I’m sure many people immediately grasped the impact of this. Wow! An operating system from Google, of all people. Look out, Microsoft. Look out, world as we know it!

But my dirty little secret is: I had no idea what they were talking about. Oh, sure, I spend an inordinate amount of each day on the computer, just like everybody else, asking it to perform, retrieve information, save, insert, delete, compute, log on, log off, send – and faster, please! But the mechanical details of all that, how it works and why, I just trust to God and the IT people.

I grew up in an era when the technological innovations in consumer items like cars, TVs, radios, refrigerators, toasters, etc., progressed perhaps every five or six years. Today, technology seems to progress every five to six months. Look at movies from the 1990s and see the computers, cell phones and answering machines they used. You’ll laugh. They thought they were so high-tech in 1997. They were Medieval.

If you, like me, get a headache every time someone uses the word “app,” you might have been as reassured as I was to see that bar code technology celebrated its 35th birthday this summer. In a world of change, where Apple announces a new and improved iPhone will be coming out soon – even as crowds are lining up for the previous version that just came out – 35 years is a pretty long time to still be in place, relatively unchanged.

Not to say there isn’t something better out there. In our anything-is-possible world, there always is. We’ve been hearing that RFID tags are the future of retailing, but we’ve been hearing that for years. In the meantime, we’re still scanning bar codes for nearly everything. There’s a bar code on my driver’s license, my library card, my retail loyalty cards, my Delta frequent flier card. It’s my passport of identification. In fact, there’s a bar code on my passport.

So, IT geniuses, keep working on something better. But in the meantime, apply your energies to something that would really be useful – like cell phones that don’t operate when people are driving. That would be progress.