Executive Outlook: AIDC: Past, Present, And Future

By Dr. Clive Hohberger, AIM, Inc.

It has been said that "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." The opposite is true in the AIDC industry. Only by remembering how the industry evolved can we repeat its success. And history has a lot to teach us.

Many of our "modern" technologies were pioneered in the 1940s and 1950s. RFID (radio frequency identification) was developed during World War II for aircraft friend-or-foe identification. Frequency-hopping technology, which is used today in many Wi-Fi and RFID systems, was developed by actress Hedy Lamarr during WW II. The first bar code was patented by Woodland and Silver in 1952. By the '60s and '70s, AIDC technologies were in use in many stand-alone applications: Plessey bar codes on library books, NCR bar codes on cash register receipts, RFID on cattle for feed station control, magnetic stripes on financial transaction cards.