George Goldberg
1925-2003
Co-Founder of AIDC 100

George Goldberg, former editor and publisher of SCAN Newsletter, died on December 10, 2003 at North Shore Hospital in Manhasset, LI from cardiac arrest due to complications from pneumonia.

George was born on March 19, 1925 in Harlem, New York City, the second son of a retail salesman of fabric for women's dresses.  Both his parents had been youngsters from Russia who spoke no English when they arrived in the U.S. by boat from Europe, via Ellis Island, just after the turn of the century.  Their poor families had settled in Brooklyn in search of the American dream.

George graduated from Lafayette High School in Brooklyn in January 1942, two months short of his 17th birthday and one month after Pearl Harbor.

After completing a year at City College of NY, he was drafted in May 1943, after he turned 18. He trained for half-a-year in the Army Air Corps to be an officer/navigator, but, after the Battle of the Bulge, he was transferred to the regular Army and served in France and Germany for 14 months as a private in the headquarters unit of the Seventh Army, 63rd Division, 253rd Regiment.

After the war, he graduated from City College of NY in 1948, majoring in statistics, and then received a Masters in business administration from NYU two years later.

His first job, in Manhattan, was project leader for three years with a market research agency specializing in surveys of young people.  His next position, also in NYC, was as chief statistician for a newly-formed Department of Defense joint procurement agency.

In 1954, he joined a diversified American Stock Exchange-listed company, Kleer Vu Industries, headquartered in Manhattan, which manufactured and marketed plastic products and microfilm equipment.  He was with the firm for 18 years, serving as general manager, executive vice president, and then president/CEO.

In 1975, George and his wife, Teddy, co-founded their own company, GGX Associates, Inc., devoted to products for the just-emerging automatic identification/data capture (AIDC) industry. GGX, based in Great Neck, NY became one of the leading marketers of film masters and pressure sensitive labels for UPC and other bar code applications.  The company was sold in 1992.  

There were no publications in the mid-1970's covering the fledgling AIDC industry.  To fill this need, George began publishing SCAN Newsletter in September 1977 - at first with fewer than 100 subscribers.  At that time, auto ID simply involved bar coding; and bar coding was almost exclusively supermarket checkout scanning.  Over the next two decades, the industry grew to include many ADC-related technologies with worldwide applications in retailing, manufacturing, distribution, transportation, healthcare, communications, and federal and local government operations.

SCAN was a unique management and marketing newsletter covering worldwide developments in bar coding, radio frequency (RFID and RFDC), and related AIDC technologies.  In 1982, SCAN established the prestigious, annual Percival Award recognizing special contributions to AIDC by individuals or organizations from the user community.  

When SCAN Newsletter was sold to Corry Publishing in 1996, it had paid subscribers in twenty-six countries.  George remained Contributing Editor of SCAN: The DATA CAPTURE Report.

George conducted seminars on bar coding in the US, Canada, Europe, Russia, and China; he was the technical advisor to the book publishing industry committee on bar coding; he served as a member of the ANSI committees which established standards for package marking; he has written articles on AIDC for numerous publications.

He was particularly proud of his most recent achievement as a co-founder of AIDC 100, an organization of the leading professionals from the AIDC industry.  Under his leadership and guidance, the Melville Library at the State University of New York at Stony Brook has established a Special Collection for the AIDC 100 Industry archive.

George is survived by his wife of 55 years and longtime business partner, Teddy. They had two sons and a daughter.  Jeff, 53, is an author and TV producer in Washington, DC; Robbi, 49, is an artist in E. Moriches, LI; David, 42, is a music composer, who lives with his wife Nanci in Port Washington, NY and George's baby grandson, Jonathan.