Every purchase evokes his design of the rectangular Universal Product Code. But although it became ubiquitous, he received no royalties. By Sam Roberts George J. Laurer, whose design of the vertically ...

What's black and white and read all over? Bar codes that can tell us who manufactured a product and where it's been — except when it comes to the financial services industry. Here, financial firms and ...

The bar code is now a packaging mainstay, but it probably wouldn't have worked without George Laurer. On a June morning in 1974, a Marsh Supermarket cashier in Troy, Ohio, rang up a 67-cent pack of ...

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If he had followed instructions from his boss, George Laurer might never have succeeded in designing the Universal Product Code. In 1971, a supervisor at International Business Machines Corp. told the ...

On a June morning in 1974, a Marsh Supermarket cashier in Troy, Ohio, rang up a 67-cent pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum using something novel — the black and white stripes of a universal bar code. The ...

Product bar codes were originally developed to help with inventory tracking and speed up checkout at grocery stores. The relative speed and ease of use of the bar code system, or Universal Product ...