91: The Barcode with Paul V. McEnroe

This episode has been automatically transcribed by AI, please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.

Chris: Paul V. McEnroe is an award winning engineer who developed multiple state of the art technologies during his long career, including more than two decades in leadership roles at IBM. McEnroe is best known for his primary role in developing the universal product code, or UPC, the barcode used on every product in supermarkets and in the retail industry, and the scanners that read them.

Chris: In his upcoming business memoir titled “The Barcode”, Paul tells his story of leading the team that developed one of the most innovative and influential technologies of our generation. Paul, it’s an honor to welcome you to my barcode.

Paul: Yeah, I’m amazed that there’s a program called The Barcode, and I’m delighted to join in with you. Nice to meet you.

Chris: You too, man. Would you mind sharing your background with us and specifically how you evolved as an innovator, eventually leading you to IBM?

Paul: Sure, yeah. I had an interesting start to life. I went from an orphanage in Michigan, adopted as a young child by a loving family in Dayton, Ohio. Went there. They were uneducated, but kind, loving people, great parents. And they taught me the value of education because they didn’t have much of it. My father never even went to school. I went to the local schools, high school, and then kind of worked my way into a job that by living at home and going to an inexpensive school, I was able to get my degree. And then that gave me opportunities for free to go to grad school because there were all kinds of offers at that time, and I did that, and grad school led to offers at IBM.

Paul: And you see the background of my well, you don’t see it, but we live in a barn here. And my father taught me the value and the love he had for the west and so on. So I joined IBM in California, and I spent the first nine years working on technologies that had some hope of hitting the market. We were advanced development. That’s to say, we were closer in than research, but further out than immediate development.

Paul: And I focused on scanning. By luck, I mean, that’s just the field they asked me to go into. And I did scanning of big things for General Motors, drawings of cars, and little things like for the CIA, the kind of thing that, if you remember, the guy Q in James Bond would have put micro images on the head of a pin. I did that kind of thing. And then in , IBM happened to come to me and said, gee, would you be interested in taking on the head engineering? And later it got to be the business part as well, of a new business for us.

Paul: You get to pick out what business, but you got to start a new business. And the background to that was that the CEO of IBM, Frank Kerry, very famous guy, felt that the growth in the world of pure computers was not sufficient to allow IBM to continue its growth that it had been doing for the last four or five years. And so he sent his troops out to go to Silicon Valley and buy some companies. And they told him, hey, any company you buy, everybody will quit the next morning because they don’t like white shirts and blue suits and black wing tip shoes and red ties and all know the culture isn’t there. So then he said, well, find somebody in IBM and paint a red line around them. Let them operate like as if they were a startup and do it that way. And so that was what led this other executive to come to me and offer me this opportunity.

Paul: And so I joined with two other compatriots, a marketing guy and an experienced engineering manufacturing guy, and we sat down and pulled together a proposal, just like proposal you would make to venture capitalists. And we presented that to IBM senior management. They accepted the deal. It was only $, the first year, a million the second,  million the third. They bought the deal. And they kind of turned me loose.

Paul: And I looked at different industries to go after, like, for example, banking and so on, but decided on point of sale, because the point of sale industry had been identifying the need for item identification. And they had long lines in supermarkets, and they weren’t doing price marking and remarking very well. And order, inventory control ordering was terrible. And we knew all that because IBM owned the back rooms in those businesses in the Safeway’s and the Kroger’s and Macy’s and so on.

Paul: And so we knew that stuff, and I got to see that data. And also it was all managed by National Cash Register Company, in whose shadow I had grown up in Dayton, Ohio. They had , round numbers people working there. And I realized that it was an easy target because they had these big iron machines that were going to be very hard to modify. They’d have to start all over again. And they had % of the market worldwide.

Paul: So that was one of the reasons I went after Point of Sale, and I had done the scanning, and I figured we could come up with some kind of a code that we can scan, et cetera, et cetera. So that’s kind of how it all started. And it was , and then the supermarket industry put together an ad hoc committee based on their senior membership of the companies that made up the Supermarket Institute. All the names that everyone knows today, a and P in those days, Kroger, Safeway, blah, blah, blah, actually came out.

Paul: They started in  with this committee, and they invited companies to propose codes. And we were one of the companies that proposed a code, one of , and there were seven finalists. And in the book I wrote, I actually show the article, the key picture in the article of Business Week when it was selected in , ,  years ago now. And they picked our code. And so that was the big deal. Yeah.

Chris: Do you feel like that was the pivotal point for Barcode moving forward?

Paul: Yeah, I think so, because we had codes before that and we had done a lot of analysis and a lot of work on readability and the fact that low error rates were in demand. Because in the first half dozen years of the use of the code, we knew and everybody else knew that the manufacturers weren’t going to be doing the marking. The people that were making Wheaties boxes weren’t going to do the marking those first six years, on average.

Paul: Most of the stuff is going to have to be price marked in the store in very cheap, inexpensive, low quality printers, because that’s all you could afford to put in supermarkets in volume. And so you had to have a code that had error correction, error detection, all this kind of stuff built into it, and also that was very reliable. The bars had to be wide enough to be able to be read by the technology of scanning. At the time, lasers of low power lasers had just come out. Helium, neon lasers, half milliwatt, and a number of other things were right on the verge of coming available, and we were able to incorporate them, such things as integrated circuits. The first integrated circuits in IBM went into the point of sale device.

Paul: So we pulled all that stuff together, and the more one studies what we did and the length of time it took and all of that sort of thing, the more you realize it wasn’t just a code, it was a system solution of a lot of complex products that we had and IBM developed. By the time we got done, I had teams supporting me, and I talk about it on the title page of the Know It’s, the team that developed the barcode. It was no individual.

Paul: And we had other teams besides my own team, which we moved to Roy, North Carolina, across the country and across the globe on three continents and in many different countries, all putting products out that came into the code. And the first scanning occurred in .

Chris: Yeah, so it sounds like it really aligned. Well, I mean, you had the expertise, you had the technology. It doesn’t sound like there are any other organizations that really could have devised this even if they wanted to.

Paul: Well, I wouldn’t come out strongly and say that that was the case, because maybe other people could have come up with the technologies. But you got a very good point there. And one of the first readers of the book, who is a historian from the Santa Clara Valley and Silicon Valley, Mike Malone, he actually wrote a piece, it’s in the forward of the book. He wrote the forward, and he said that he thought that there really wasn’t any other place where he would have been able to do this as straightforwardly as we did it, because we needed new communications technology.

Paul: How do you pass the signal around? And then we needed new disc technology, magnetic recording, because think of this standard American supermarket, ten to twelve in a very big supermarket check stands in the front of the store. But all those check stands had to be able to pull an item, have an item pulled across their scanner, simultaneously, go back to the back of the store. So this is the communications piece.

Paul: And in that computer in the back of the store, which was a specialized control unit that we built, they have to be able to look up for all ten or twelve of those things simultaneously. And it fast enough to look it up and make an inventory adjustment and send it and anything else you wanted to print on the item back to each of the ten different or twelve different check stands faster than the person can realize that okay, anything is happening. He just sees the person at the check stand, sees an item pulled across the check stand, and immediately they see on the screen how much it cost and so on and so forth.

Paul: Now go to Europe. And there were  check stands in the front of the store, in the Costco like stores, they were called cash and carry markets. And so that’s what we had to do. And so to have a file that had enough storage space to put all this stuff on the disk and at the same time look it up fast enough without any delay of spinning the disk, so we had to have contact and non-contact recording. So we used what later became Winchester technology for the floppy disk.

Paul: This was the first application of that, and we had started that in the lab that I worked in those first nine years in IBM. So a lot of these technologies, all coming together. And you talked about cyber as an interest of your following. And it wasn’t really high quality cyber, but it was nine type error detection, error correction in the code. So, I mean, if somebody scans the code wrong, if you get one digit blobbed with ink or something like that, it will correct that for you and figure out what that digit should have been and do that. And we did that back in the late s, early s.

Chris: So I’m curious, when you look back at the impact of the barcode, what are some unexpected and innovative ways that have emerged over the years? Have you come across any instances where the barcode has been employed for purposes other than its original intended use?

Paul: Well, it’s sort of a peripheral idea, but the most amazing one is Amazon, if you think of that operation. I make a point in the thing when the Supermarket Institute said they were going to select a code wisely, they said, whatever code we select has to be in the public domain or we will not select it. So all of the companies that submitted codes had to give up any patent rights that they would have had to the code.

Paul: So I made the point in my book, nobody got rich on the barcode. Nobody got anything. There’s no patent on it. So we don’t talk about invented because we didn’t follow patent. But having said that, the guy that made the money on it was Jeff Bezos. Because if you look at Amazon, every time you order something online, just think about how they make it. I mean, they have so many barcodes in every little if you order a toothbrush, a barcode tells it where to go down the line, a barcode tells it which way to go, which package to fit in. A barcode picks out the package and sends it together, and it’s all automated, and it gets put in a box.

Paul: It gets put in a box with other things that are scanned, and they see your order. It’s got these three items. So we’ll put those three in the same box. Oh, no, one of them isn’t available yet, so don’t put it in that box. Put it in another box and send the two things to the guy right away because he’s got Amazon Prime and so on and so forth. So, I mean, that’s an application. We never quite dreamed of all of that.

Paul: And it actually wiped out the stores that we were kind of supporting the Macy’s and the Neiman Marcus and everything that we were doing. So that was one application that was.

Chris: Quite different in terms of when the concept of e commerce hit and became popular. Was that a scary time for you? I mean, with the influx of online shoppers, was that ever a concern for you?

Paul: No, I actually left IBM in  and went to another company and so on and so forth, and then I retired to become a rancher in . And so, no, I wasn’t worried about it at all or anything like that. But you did ask sort of, is there any unusual things that we didn’t expect? Well, in addition to unexpected uses, a lot of the big problems of the barcode were very unexpected. I had no idea  states passed laws against the barcode.

Paul: Our first store, when you have your first store open, grand opening. It was the giant store in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, not just across from Washington, DC. And I sent my best engineer up there, communications engineer, and in case anything went wrong, I figured he could fix it. And by the way, we had a duplicated controller, so if one controller failed, the other automatically took over. You didn’t even have to push any buttons.

Paul: Duplex. Anyway, I’m sitting here at my desk waiting for the call in the morning that the store opened. Everything is fine. He calls me and he says, Paul, I’m sorry, but the store couldn’t open. What? How could that mean? We checked everything six ways from Sunday. He says, yeah, no, it’s not the equipment. There’s a line of protesters in front of the store. They won’t let anybody in. And people were saying, oh, they’re taking the price off the items. We won’t know what the price is.

Paul: And the labor unions were afraid they were going to lose the check stand, operator jobs and so on and so forth. Well, that all kind of fizzed in the short term in that area. And so the store opened, but over the next several months, as I said before,  different states, I believe is the number passed laws against the code. And I had to become a lobbyist and travel around the country explaining to them this was a situation.

Paul: I mean, one, I’ll keep him unnamed. It’s kind of embarrassing. It would be argued before Congress that how can we put a laser in a supermarket when their Air Force is talking about using them to shoot airplanes out of the sky? I mean, this is totally ridiculous. And I explained, and I even put this in the book, too, that one of the  watt bulbs in the store has thousands of times more energy than the laser that we put in the check stand. It’s a half a milliwatt, half a thousandth of a watt, and you know how many  watt lights are in the store.

Paul: And so it’s kind of ridiculous, but that was a real serious problem. If you want a little story on that, the first test store that I went to was in Montreal, Quebec, and because we wanted to do things outside the United States as well, and the Canadian government had sent an inspector, senior person there because they had heard concerns about taking the price off the items, too. And I was in the store during this test phase, and of course, the prices were on the area of the shelf near where the item was, as you could see, like it is today, but there was no item stamped on each individual carton of food or can of food.

Paul: And so he stopped this elderly lady who’s walking with a cane out the front of the door with her basket full of groceries. And he said, are you really upset about the fact that there’s no price on these items and is that a problem for you? And she says, oh no, quite the opposite. Look at this slip I have. And so she pulls out the check slip that had come out of the printer and of course it says Olives Giant oz or whatever.

Paul: And then the price twenty seven cents. And she says with this I go to the grocery store down the street and I can see how much I paid for everything and look on the shelf and see exactly how much that costs there. That’s the only time in my whole life I’ve been able to really comparison shop because otherwise you just got a slip that just had numbers on it, like  numbers. You had no idea which one was for what.

Paul: And she says, man, this is great. So that guy went back to the Canadian government and that was one of the governments we never heard any problem from. They went out and talked to the people and so on and so forth. That was quite unusual.

Chris: Yeah.

Paul: Another one is Monkeys monkey business is one of the stories in my book. We told the IBM attorneys got wind of the fact that we were putting half a milliwatt helium neon laser into the scanner and they said no mean people are going to have sunspots on their eye that they got from looking at the sun. They’re going to claim it was caused by the laser, especially if they’re check stand operators and they’re using it every day.

Paul: Well of course we had devices that didn’t let the light even come out the window of the glass under the scanner, I mean under the check stand. Unless an item was being pulled across the top, it turns on and turns off. But still they were saying, well, people will hold it open in some fashion and then look down it and commit laser suicide. This was a term invented by the IBM lawyers and then they’ll say that this was known, what are we going to so I had to find who is the best expert in the world on laser safety and it was an engineer at Stanford Research Institute next to Stanford University, but not connected to the university. I went out and I wrote a contract with him to do groundbreaking work on the effect of accumulated light.

Paul: It was well known how much immediate light would cause an instant failure of the eye, but not accumulation over him. I had to fund him to go to acquire from Africa a whole bunch of monkeys and test the monkeys by shining laser light at them for a long time in a special apparatus and everything. And the funny story is that when the project was finished one day at the loading dock in IBM, I get told, hey, Paul, you won’t believe what’s down at the loading dock.

Paul: And he sent me the monkeys. And then I had to go find a zoo, which I did, and the north Carolina zoo was just opening, and they were happy to get the monkeys, but it was quite an affair. But the testing proved that there was no problem with the accumulation of light from half a milliwatt laser on the human eye. So a lot of different things that you don’t think of that come up in program development like this.

Chris: Okay, so you retired from IBM in . And then what happened?

Paul: And then I became president of a company called trilogy, which had been created by gene Amdahl out in silicon valley. His president of his company had died of brain hemorrhage that came up all of a sudden. And gene had been the inventor of the IBM . You’re familiar with that? He was the engineering manager that created the first computer of all time that had small, medium, large, extra-large, and extra, extra extra-large versions of it. And that was April of , and he became very famous for that. And then he went out and founded AMDAL corporation, and then he later founded trilogy. And trilogy was invested in heavily by a lot of different sources and so on. And his president died, and he asked me if I would come out and help him with that, which I did for a lot of other reasons.

Paul: I kind of basically had to leave the area that I was in in Raleigh, because I had a death in the family. A  year old son was killed, and I had to move my wife out of the area, and so on and so forth. Anyway, make a long story short, I went to trilogy, and so we continued on with there. That was wafer scale integration is what it was. And it was a monster computer. The computer never did make it, which I was already worried about when I went there. But there was a lot of technology, and we did develop that technology, sold the technology to digital equipment corporation dec, and then dec used it to build their monster computer.

Paul: Problem was that their monster computer also died later, because it was the end of the time for monster computers, and the PCs were taking over the world and so on and so forth. And so that changed as well. And then when that changed, we had to go a different direction. And we used the technology that they had to package many different chips in PCs and other things on the substrates that we had developed, which were copper, polyimide, technology.

Paul: And so that technology came out very well. And then I did retire from that company, and I was president for a short period of time of a consulting company. And then I retired to ranching here.

Chris: Nice. So what did you think of the QR code when it came out? Did you think of it as a genuine innovation or more of a cheap imitation?

Paul: My view of it was it was kind of a variation of the barcode. I mean, we were using one dimension. We were going in a certain plane. And it obviously makes sense that when you get to technologies that are  years, ,  years newer, you have much smaller spot size that you can use. And the integrated circuits, I told you we were doing the first integrated circuits in IBM, okay? Guess how many circuits we had on a chip in our fantastic integrated circuits?

Paul: About . Not ,, not ,,, period. And so now with what they can do, obviously they can cause the scans to go all which directions, and they can do what they do in the QR code. They can do a scan left and right, but they can also do one up and down and use the area instead of just a single dimension scan. So I think it was a natural growth of the technology, and I applaud it. And it gives you a lot more data that you can work with and you can do many more things.

Paul: I don’t think it’s going to compete directly, at least in the near term, with the barcode, because a barcode, you can read that thing at very high speeds while you’re spinning it and everything else with no problem. But with QR codes, it isn’t quite to that level. I mean, somebody can’t throw it. One of the stories that I tell is early in the program, very early in the program, before it was selected as a standard and everything, in , we changed division presidents. And the new division president of my division that was funding it, the money I told you about before, he came down to my laboratory and I told him what we were planning to do, and he said, Wait a minute. Now you’re going to grab this item.

Paul: You’re going to throw it or pull it or something while it might be spinning, and it might be one to six inches off the top of the table, and you’re going to pull it by there at  inches a second. That was the specification. And you’re going to read it, and then you’re going to do all this stuff with what you read and print it out, and then another one is going to come by fraction of a second later, and you’re going to do that also with it. You’re going to send all this data back.

Paul: He said, that’s the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard. And he said, I would kill this project immediately. But I know you guys have a reputation, and so I’m going to go away. We’ve given you the money. I’m going to go away for one year and I’m coming back. And if this damn thing doesn’t work, which I’m almost certain it won’t, your desk is going in the parking lot. So he came back a year later to the day, and we brought him in the lab and he stood there and we had a pack of cigarettes. I hate to talk about cigarettes, but he had a pack of cigarettes with it, had a barcode on it that we had printed the crummy one and stuck on there.

Paul: And he threw it spinning from one end of the check stand to the other, during which time it passed over the window. That the barcode, I mean, that the scanner light came out of and it read it. And then he said, well, I’ll be and I won’t finish the sentence. And then he went and he opened the doors to the bottom and opened it up to look underneath to see if we had a little engineer under the check stand pushing buttons to make it work.

Paul: And there was no engineer under there. And so that was that. You can’t do that with a QR code. You still don’t do it with a QR code. So I think that the barcodes are going to be around for quite a long time. And by the way, a lot of people don’t know this, but the encoding that we did for retail was magnetic encoding. It’s the same code. You guys being cyber oriented, you can understand that the encoding is the same.

Paul: It’s just it’s a magnetic bar and a magnetic space and a magnetic bar and then no magnetics, which is the magnetic space. But we could get higher densities there because the retail stores wanted not just a number for the on a barcode, you got numbers. Five numbers on the left of a typical barcode, a regular size one, and five numbers on the right. The numbers on the left are for the manufacturer producer, and the number on the right are for the product within his thing.

Paul: And that works for the whole world. But in retail, they wanted the name of the manufacturer, they wanted the name of the fashion designer, they wanted the color. And the color might be not just red, white or blue. It might be some color that people who are into design like, which are a lot more letters than black and blue and then all other kinds of details about it. And so they wanted  alphanumeric characters, and we couldn’t get  alphanumeric characters in a small little space. So we encoded it magnetically and we built wands for it magnetically as well.

Paul: And so the same code is used in a magnetic form in retail. Now, a lot of that has died, especially with COVID and everything else that’s happened. So now a lot of. Retail stores have just gone back and decided to put up with the regular optical barcode because it’s so ubiquitous now. But until ten years ago, they were very heavily used.

Chris: So this year, my show reaches its three year milestone while the original barcode turns . Is this timing why you’ve decided to share your story now?

Paul: No, it just lucked out, to be honest with you. I’m  years old now, and I had been fooling around with writing a memoir for quite a few years, and I dictated quite a bit of stuff, and I was primarily writing it for family and friends and so on and so forth. And they got reading what I had written, and they said, hey, the barcode part of this would be interesting to people all over the world. You need to focus on that.

Paul: But I didn’t want to write a book that was six inches thick that nobody would buy or nobody would even want to read. Forget buy. I wasn’t even thinking about people buying it. I took out most of the personal stuff. I’m an equestrian. I had a lot of stuff on equestrian things, took that all out, and I done a bunch of other things not in the field of engineering. I took that stuff, most of that out and just came up with this code. So it’s a memoir, but it’s a focus on the barcode.

Paul: And a thing I did put in it that your cyber people might be interested in is I wanted to make it readable by everybody, no matter what type of a background they had. So it’s written that way. But I also felt like there’s nothing been documented on all of the analysis that went into coming up with the barcode. And I had written, as a proposal to the National Retail Merchants Association in , a publication, an authored publication that was a proposal of the code and the various versions of the code that we looked and what the characteristics were with their equations and graphs of readability and density and so on and so forth.

Paul: I included that entire booklet in the appendix. So in the appendix, if somebody wants to if they’re technically oriented, they have a mathematician, they’re engineers enough that they can read equations and that sort of thing, they can read that, and they’ll see what the analysis was at that time. It’s not today’s analysis. It’s what we thought at that time. It’s still true. So that’s the appendix. But you don’t have to read the appendix.

Paul: The book is  pages, plus or minus, and then this is a  page appendix, but you can skip that or not, or you can just look at the graphs in it if you just wanted to, to see what the general idea was without reading the details. So I did include that. So basically the book is full of stories and what happened, the things that we’ve talked about, but the appendix is a document for gurus that really want to dig in and see what we thought of at the time.

Chris: I love that. I love that. And for , I love your energy. So you’ve often spoken to the challenges in developing the barcode and how its ultimate success was a result of collaborative teamwork. What timeless advice do you have for structuring a team effectively to achieve seemingly impossible goals?

Paul: Yeah, well, I really do believe in the team concept, and I’ve been asked the question of what do you do? It kind of depends on the field that you’re in, what exact direction you go. But no matter what the field, the team thing is very similar. I think that if you have a direction already set and you want to go down a path, you’re way better off with a team. Teams come up with ideas. You bounce ideas off other people, and they get more because of what you said, and you get more because of what they said.

Paul: If you just look back at my team, as I pointed out, when IBM said, do this, I got two other people to help me. One was an engineer, a degreed engineer. He had his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from MIT, but he also had an MBA from Harvard. But he wasn’t an individual speaker and he wasn’t a manager. He was a brilliant guy at analyzing things. And then I got another guy who was  years older than me, approximately  anyway, and he had more experience at making products come out the door. I mentioned I had been in development, but we didn’t really build products. We built stuff that worked in the lab.

Paul: So I needed those two things. So you supplement the point there is you supplement your own background with members of your and that was the group, just three of us that got the funding. Then after we got the funding, I was asked to go to Raleigh, North Carolina, because IBM had just opened a manufacturing facility there, and it was the least full one in the company, and so we wanted to fill it up. So I went there, and they had a development lab. There about  people in it.

Paul: And I looked around for who did I need and who would be able to come to work for me. That was so I looked at the engineering team. I found one guy who had built printers and other mechanisms, especially communications devices for card handling. You remember the IBM cards and all that stuff. And he again was quite a bit older than I was, a decade anyway, and a very bright guy, very hard to manage, had his own ideas, was successful, and had a lot of patents, and he was a little difficult to manage. And one of the management problems was he was always working for younger guys who were on their way up, who were first level managers. He was an individual contributor, not a manager.

Paul: And he was making more money than they were, and so that bothered him too. How are they going to feel good about giving me a raise when I’m already making a lot more than they are? And so on and so forth. So he was kind of a problem, but I figured he was brilliant and he had experience in the backgrounds that we needed. So I hired him, and then we went on. His name, by the way, was George Lauer, and he’s written up a lot in Wikipedia and this, that, and everything.

Paul: I hired two other guys, Alex Soshnikov and Bill Betts, and they were communications engineers. They really understood communications. They understood error detection, error correction, all this kind of stuff, because we were sending signals down telephone lines because IBM was building the computers, and a lot of the data had to come over a telephone line. We had a big monster computer that was nothing but an interface between telephone lines and our computer, and they had worked on the development of those. That was one of the things they did in Raleigh. So I got those two guys, so now I got six.

Paul: And then I had a couple of other general purpose engineers that were innovative and thoughtful and excellent general purpose kind of guys. So I got them. So we got it up to five. And then I hired of an engineer from a failed operation in IBM. IBM had tried the point of sale thing about six or eight years before, and that the product didn’t make it. It didn’t make it because it didn’t pass the IBM rules.

Paul: In IBM, you had to project what your income was going to be, and what your profit was going to be, and how much the development expense was going to be, and the development expense was too high, and the profit was too low. So they killed the program. But this guy right at the end of the program had come forth and projected new ideas that were right along the lines of my ideas for integrating circuits that were just coming out and putting new technology into a thing that looked like a PC.

Paul: If you think about it, the thing that sits on the desk on top of the cash drawer looks like a PC in the day. And this is a decade before the PCs. And so I had to beg, borrow, and talk him into moving from Rochester, Minnesota, which was the lab he worked in at IBM down to North Carolina. But he came, his name was Roger Kaus. And so that was my six, and so those six guys. And then later I got a mechanical engineer who was pretty good at magnetics, jack Jones, and he came on. So we started with six, grew to seven, that type of thing, for the first fairly long period of time.

Paul: And they pulled the whole thing together. And so I think that’s the thing to do when you talk about building a team, find team members that are going to be able to complement your own technologies and your own backgrounds and people who are motivated and interested and want to get something done and hardworking. And they may have this problem or that problem or the other problem, but if they want to get the job done, they’re hardworking, they’re successful.

Paul: To some degree, it works. And I had all ages, the two communications guys, one was old enough to be the father of the other, but it was okay. They work well together. And then we built the team up. And if you have a team, you can share the load. But I think communications is so important, you can’t just tell somebody to do something and put them off in a corner. You have to talk to them all the time. How are you doing today?

Paul: What’s the new thing today? Oh, this guy over here has this problem. That guy has that problem. Maybe you could go help him, and you have to talk to him about what’s important. What do we have to solve? Oh, that’s not important. Let’s just throw it out the window or not work on it this week or next week or next month. So you have to lead the team. You can’t just let them wander. And I think we all talked almost every day to each other about, well, what are we doing?

Paul: One of the biggest problems with the code, for example, wasn’t even come up with by the guys that were working on the codes, per se. It came from a guy who was doing general kind of work, and that is it was very important for the code to be small enough that it didn’t take up too much space. The manufacturers, really, they covet the space on their package, and they didn’t want a big code. The code that other people had proposed, which didn’t work, and thank God it wasn’t selected, was a bullseye code. But bullseye has obviously, if you take a scan across it, it goes through the middle, which sooner or later it will. If you pull it across a line scan one time, it’s going to go through the middle.

Paul: Then you don’t have to orient it. So we got around the orientation for the barcode by having the scan be an X scan. And so in order for an X scan to be guaranteed to go through every bar of the code, if you have a single X, if you think about it for a while, you’ll figure out that the height of the code has to be taller than its width. And if that is the case, then an X scan will go through it. Okay. And so we got an X scan. We took light from the laser, bounced it off a mirror that was oscillating from right to left, and bounced that light in turn off another mirror that was oscillating up and down.

Paul: And so that gives you an X scan or Lizzie’s view pattern, sine cosine crossing, if you’re into that technology. And so that provided the X. And we just used a little center part of that. But if we made the bars so big that they were taller than they were wide, we didn’t make the requirement for how big it would have been too big. So one of these guys who wasn’t even doing it said, hey, do two codes, put one next to the other, and then they don’t have to be taller than they are wide. Just each one has to be taller than it is wide. And let the computer figure out, is it the left half or the right half? So we encoded the left half differently than the right half. So if you go to a barcode and you look at the code, if you see a particular number on the left side and the same number on the right side, you look above it at the bars, you’ll see the bars are different, but on the same side, they’re the same.

Paul: So we did reverse coding. So the scanner, when it scans, it might scan the right side first. It might scan the left side first. But the point is, it recognizes that one is the right and one is the left. It adds them together, and this way we didn’t have to have the code taller than it was wide, and we could still be Omnidirectional, and that was a different guy in the team. So he just came up with that idea and bingo.

Paul: Teamwork really helps out. And a team can do a lot more than an individual. And I really wanted to put a team on the COVID And on the COVID of the book, I actually got one right here. It says how a team created the most ubiquitous technology, or something like that. So the point is, I think teams are critical, and there’s not much you just get to do all by yourself. And it happens easily. As I said, this was a program, the team, it started small and it stayed small for the formation of the code and everything. But by the time I left the business, it was several hundred people in the team.

Chris: Mentorship is also something you discuss in your book. How pivotal do you feel Mentorship was in your journey to success?

Paul: I think it was amazing. I think it was amazing. When I walked in the door of IBM, they took me down and they introduced me to a guy who he had an office with two desks in it. And he had one desk, and so I got the other desk, and they introduced me to the guy. And he was a mechanical engineer that was going to school part time to get his degree in electrical engineering at San Jose State College. And he got that degree, and I was on a different project, we weren’t on the same project, but I learned so much from him, and he became a mentor of mine. He was five years older than I, and by the way, he later became the president of IBM when it was the biggest company in the world from the point of view of profit and the point of view of value of its stock.

Paul: And he was the only person with a technical background that ever became the president of IBM. And he was my mentor. And the thing I remember most about him is whenever he talked to me about anybody else, he always said the most complimentary thing about them that he could think mean, that was the way he thought he thought about. So he was extremely important to me and other people throughout the company. I mentioned Frank Kerry, who is the CEO, and IBM one of the most famous ones of all time.

Paul: And I told you about the problems that came up from the first store didn’t open, and then the  states passed laws against it, and so on and so forth. Well, just in the middle of all of that, there was a board of directors meeting of IBM in Raleigh, North Carolina, which is pretty rare, and I had to address the organization and tell them about our program. And I did. And I’m talking now to a formal meeting of the board of trustees of the biggest company in the world by those.

Paul: So one guy asked in quite a nasty tone, one of the trustees board of directors members, why didn’t you see all of this coming? That these people were going to object to no pricing and that labor unions were going to go against you and they were going to turn on you in this way? And it was pretty argumentative and it was in a pretty nasty tone. And I started to try to answer that question and up jump Frank Kerry from the front row of the I was on a little stage and he runs up on the stage and stands next to me and he says, that question should be addressed to me.

Paul: And then he turned to me and he said, Paul warned me about these things early on in the program, and I told him to go ahead full speed, so you need to address that question to me, and blah, blah, blah. And the guy just sank in his seat like he wanted to get under his know. And that was the end of that, because Frank Kerrick was one of the most famous CEOs in the world at the time, and there’s a mentor for you.

Paul: He became one of my mentors years later when I was working in headquarters and I had left the program and so on. He asked me to go to Japan for the company and for other people that he was working with outside the company to do an analysis for him on why the Japanese were beating us in so many different industries and technologies and everything. I felt like he was a mentor for me. And here, six, eight years later, he did that for me with me in whatever way you want to say it, but I think mentoring is very important.

Paul: And if you have the opportunity to help younger people coming up, by all means do it. And if you’re a young person coming up, latch on to the people who are willing to help you because it might make the difference between success and failure.

Chris: % agree. I just heard last call here, so I have one more for you. If you decided to open a cybersecurity themed bar, what would the name be and what would your signature drink be called?

Paul: That’s pretty interesting. I think the last time I was in a bar doing something like that, the favorite drink was a Harvey Wallbanger. I go to lunch now and I love to play golf, and I have a club and the bartender is a historian, so he gives me a history lesson all the time. But I think if I had to come up with something barcode, that’s a great idea.

Chris: And you could take that.

Paul: Yeah, okay. Yeah, I think the barcode. I like that. Yeah, the barcode. Maybe put a dash between the R and the C. Love it. The Barcode. Because that’s actually the title of the book, too. Exactly. The Barcode. And people had  different suggestions for me and I came back to that. You can’t be confused about what it’s going to be. I’ll accept your offer and be happy that I’m the only guy that got the offer.

Chris: You got it. And what do you serve in there?

Paul: Yeah, what do I serve in there? How about I love after dinner liqueurs. How about a cream to, you know, maybe over a little ice cream, too.

Chris: I love that, man. Paul, thanks so much for stopping by and sharing your story with us. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation.

Paul: Okay, great. Well, I enjoyed it too.

Chris: You take care.