File Formats & Standards · Recorded milestone
UPC barcode symbol
Recorded year1973
US grocers adopt IBM engineer George Laurer's Universal Product Code, a striped symbol that gives every product a scannable 12-digit number.
Explore this milestone on the interactive mapBuilt on
- Integrated circuitRecorded · 1958enables
- LaserRecorded · 1960enables
Led to
- Barcode scanningRecorded · 1974enables
- QR codeRecorded · 1994enables
Sources & evidence
Dataset updated 2026-10-18. This individual record has not been separately re-reviewed.