The postal service has been using bar codes for at least a decade to speed up service.
Thank you!
I will pass it along....
The USPS is the custodian of Rabinow’s documentation submitted for his 4 basic patents for what has become OCR and Barcode reading technology. Doing a quick search the first patent was granted in 1959.
I was behind the counter at my post office the other day. All the boxes have a tab with a bar code. It makes things a lot speedier and more acurate this way.
The reason I was behind the counter was because the code scanner was on its charger and the postmistress needed to get the code off the package to get it into the computer as delivered.