Talk:Universal Product Code/Archives/2014

Development of the IBM UPC proposal

Some corrections:

Baumeister actually proposed the split label shortly after he made the basic proposal for the long lines label. The image in the article shows his contributions.

Laurer's proposal attempt initially used the Delta B code but that resulted in a very large label, see the table in the article. Crouse suggested to Laurer that he use his Delta C patent. Laurer used the Delta C teachings to generate an alphabet for the label and that resulted in a label very nearly the present size. After the Rochester presentation Laurer and the Supper Market Committee added features that required the measurement of bar and space width, a violation of the Delta C teachings. These changes did not reduce the size of the label but did reduce the readability. This should have been fixed by increasing the label size or coding the extra functions in a slightly larger Delta C character set. The two added characters added with bar width measurement requirements were, by far, the cause of most read failures. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.53.104.196 (talk) 23:00, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

The Delta C patent teaches that barcodes should use leading to leading or trailing to trailing bar edge distances. Reading bar or space widths suffers from the print error caused by ink spread.UPCMaker —Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.53.104.196 (talk) 23:57, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

Since I am the original author of this historical record of the IBM UPC proposal I feel the need to suggest some clarifications to the discrepancies that it has collected. There is no published hard print of these events as Wikipedia demands. There were only three people that actually witnessed the development of the IBM UPC proposal. Others may have seen some of it after the fact or from a distance. Of the three that had firsthand information of these happenings one hasn’t spoke of it for forty-two years. I tried to preserve the history. Some alternate or vague interpretations of events have been presented and others have tried to remove some of the confusion. Unfortunately some of that has made it even more confusing. I started to edit the existing article but the changes became too major. I plan to replace the whole article with whatever I can save. I am warning of my intent in case someone wants to stop me. I do this with the knowledge that the Wikipedia editors can recover the old article if they deem fit. .UPCMakerThingmaker

I did it! It is a bit long but I believe it is complete and accurate. Let’s see how long it lasts. UPCMakerThingmaker

Alert! I have just removed the Citation Request from this section not because I don't believe it is needed but because it predates the present Text. If a new Citation is needed then hopefully it will be added with a new date. I might caution, there is very little hard copy published documentation for this article. Only the three engineers involved know the details. Even so it covers an important event that should be preserved. Thingmaker