Joe Woodland invented the bar code -- that collection of lines and numbers used to ring up your groceries every time you visit the supermarket -- and after the longtime IBMer passed away earlier this month at the age of 91, the response from certain parts of the web was all too predictable.
"It's the mark of the beast!" wrote one regular Wired commenter in response to our Joe Woodland tribute, pointing readers to the 16th verse of the 13th chapter of the Book of Revelation. Revelation is the final book of the Bible's New Testament, and among other things, it foretells an apocalypse in which a beast will rise from the earth, rain fire from the heavens, and lay his mark on all of humankind -- a mark used to buy and sell.
"He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name," reads the 13th chapter. "Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man: His number is 666."
Presumably, that commenter was having a bit of fun -- he calls himself "Full Metal Pizza" and his tagline is "Soylent Green is STILL made out of people!!!" -- but ever since Woodland and his IBM colleagues introduced the Universal Product Code, they've been chased by claims that it's a step toward the apocalypse -- and not all these claims were made in jest.
When the first UPC scanners arrived in the early 1970s, according to various IBMers who worked on the project, there were protests at grocery stores -- even though the codes appeared on Coke cans and jars of applesauce, not right hands and foreheads. And in the years that followed, an urban legend arose, warning gullible types that the number 666 was hidden in each bar code. George Laurer -- who designed the bar code as we know it today, expanding on Woodland's original idea -- once received a letter via registered mail from someone who claimed to be Satan and asked Laurer how it felt to have carried out his orders.
>'All of this is pure bunk and is no more important than the fact that my first, middle, and last name all have 6 letters.'
-George Laurer
Laurer -- who has clearly tired of answering questions about the UPC and its supposed connection to the Book of Revelation -- calls all this "ludicrous." But it's also rather amusing. Laurer has long told UPC watchers that the three longer "guide bars" in each code -- one at the front, one in the middle, and one at the end -- do not represent 6's, hoping to put that urban legend to rest. But you can't squash human nature. If someone wants to find proof that the apocalypse is upon us, they will find it.
When Joe Woodland dreamed up the bar code in the late 1940s, it looked like a bull's-eye -- a series of concentric circles. But although Woodland went to work for IBM in the early '50s and helped Big Blue push the UPC into the market, he sold his original bull's eye patent to another company, and the code IBM settled on looked more like a rectangle -- a series of short, parallel lines.
This code was designed by Laurer, and it's what you see on your groceries today. Basically, an optical scanner reads the distance between the edge of each line, and these distances correspond to numbers that can then be used to identify a product.
Laurer first realized the code could be construed as some sort of apocalyptic signpost while it was still under development in the early 1970s. His daughter happened to be studying the Book of Revelation, and he couldn't help but notice that the code harbored a few 6's -- though not the 6's alleged by the urban legend that's still bouncing around the internet.
According to Laurer, the numerical values for each pattern of lines and spaces were assigned "almost arbitrarily" by the project's mathematician, David Savir, and this included a default value -- or error value -- that was used when the scanner had trouble reading a code. If the scanner read any two bars followed by an infinitely long space, it returned the number 6.
Ah, but those weren't the only the 6's.
In those days, IBM didn't really name its products as much as it numbered them. IBM's UPC scanning system -- which included the scanners themselves, terminals, a kind of local area network, and a controller -- was called the 3660. But the individual scanners were also tagged with their own number: 3666.
Bill Selmeier -- an IBM executive who worked alongside Laurer and Woodland on the project inside the IBM Store Systems group in Raleigh, North Carolina -- doesn't remember anyone in the group discussing the possibility of people protesting the scanners while they were still under development, but protest they did. When Selmeier showed up at a Ralph's grocery store in Los Angeles to see one of the first scanning systems in action, dressed in his pin-stripe suit and wing tips, a man approached and told him the code was the sign of the beast.
"I had no idea what he was talking about," Selmeier remembers. "But then I went back to hotel room and opened ... Gideon's Bible."
Contemporary news stories discussed the parallels with the Book of Revelation -- and the complaints. The complaints were myriad -- and they didn't always involve 6's. According to Laurer, early test films of the scanners were labeled with the letters F, G and H, and some saw this as proof that the code would wind up on more than just Coke cans, insisting the H stood for head and the F for forearm.
"All of this is pure bunk," says Laurer, "and is no more important than the fact that my first, middle, and last name all have 6 letters."
Of course, some people may find extreme importance in the number of letters that make up his name. That's just how people are.
