Gizmodo reports that on today's date in the early 1970s, a small supermarket in Troy, Ohio became the testing ground for the world's first commercial bar code scanner. The story says that at 8:01 am, Sharon Buchanan scanned a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum and changed retail forever. When the application caught on in the library world, it revolutionized how we do our work, making a book or dvd (or whatever library resource you can check out) accessible, traceable, and scannable!

In fact, the receipt from that transaction is now enshrined in the Smithsonian. Oh happy day!