Pete writes “An interesting article at the Seattle Timeson inventor Charles Walton and his 1970’s brain child, the RFID tag.
“For Walton, industry’s embrace of RFID is bittersweet. Back in the 1970s, the bar code was a 25-cent solution that beat out Walton’s $1.75 RFID cards as the identification system for goods scanned over supermarket checkout scanners. Now RFID may well eliminate the ubiquitous bar code.
“I feel good about it and gratified I could make a contribution,” said Walton, 83, a Los Gatos, Calif., resident who has a soft voice, easy laugh and slow walk.
Walton made about $3 million from patenting RFID technology. But his last royalty-bearing RFID patent expired in the mid-1990s, meaning that he won’t share in the potentially gigantic windfall that will be generated as Wal-Mart and the Defense Department begin to require their largest suppliers to put RFID tags on millions of warehoused goods.”
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