Bar-code scanning in supermarkets has become such an integral part of the American scene that in 1992, it even had an impact on the presidential election campaign that year.
pped at the NCR booth to observe the company's latest scanning systems. As he looked inquisitively at a carton of milk being scanned, the president was overheard saying, "That's amazing."
The media immediately jumped on this incident, seeing it as evidence that Bush probably never visited a supermarket in the almost two decades since scanning had been introduced. The media then concluded that he was out of touch with everyday technology and therefore couldn't relate to common people. The story was resurrected many times thereafter.
But NCR's Craig Maddox, director of scanner product management, insisted that the story was not accurate. In a document released in 1999 on the 25th anniversary of scanning, Maddox wrote that Bush professed amazement not at scanning per se, but at the fact that the bar code had been scanned despite having been torn into seven pieces. Bush, he said, had witnessed a demonstration of NCR's Pacesetter software, released three years earlier, which enables badly damaged bar codes to be scanned.
Still, Bush lost the election to Bill Clinton that year, perhaps because of his run-in with scanning. Also that year, Bush presented the National Medal of Technology to Norman Joseph Woodland, who was the first to patent the bar code and scanner in 1952.
