If you feel that RFID is a new technology then you need to spend a few precious minutes of your to read this post.

Let me tell you RFID is certainly not a new concept and its history can be traced back to the World War II. The American, British, Germans and Japanese had been using radars to identify planes entering their territory but which war plane was owned by a friend or foe became a Herculean task to identify. Realizing this problem the Germans found out that if their pilots rolled their planes while returning to their respective bases it would change the signal reflected back and probably this can be termed as a crude yet first passive RFID system. On the other hand Watson-Watt developed the first active identify friend or foe or IFF system for the British during the same time.

Fifties and sixties witnessed developments in the radar and RF communications system where scientists and researchers from US, Europe and Japan were involved in undertaking research with regards to this subject.

In 1973 Mario W. Cardullo got the first US patent for active RFID tag with rewritable memory. In the very particular year Californian entrepreneur Charles Walton was awarded the patent for passive transponders for unlocking door without a key. 1970s witnessed the US government undertake some serious work on RFID systems. Los Alamos National Laboratory came up with the concept of putting readers at gates of secure facilities and transponders in trucks which was commercialized by one of the laboratory scientist who developed automated toll payment system which received commercial acceptance. This era also witnessed companies develop low frequency systems with small transponders and it's still implemented among cattle around the globe. 125 kHz systems were commercialized over a period of time and companies started to move towards higher frequency which was unused in several parts of the world.

Bigger companies started realizing the potential of RFID in the nineties which saw IBM develop and patent UHF RFID systems. The early part of the nineties can be considered to be a lean period for the technology all because of the high costs and lack of standardization associated with it.

1999 can be termed as a golden year for the technology when EAN International, Gillette, Uniform Code Council and P&G created a fund for establishing Auto-ID Center at MIT. It was Sanjay Sharma and David Brock, both professors at MIT who thought about putting serial number on RFID tags to bring down their costs and this probably changed the manner in which the technology was viewed in the supply chain. They were responsible for turning RFID into networking technology and the rest as they say is history.

The period between 1999 and 2003 saw Auto-ID Center get support from more than a thousand end user companies apart from major RFID vendors and the U.S. Department of Defense. Research labs were opened up in various countries and the technology was licensed to Uniform Code Council in 2003 which entered into a JV with EAN International for commercializing the technology. The research responsibility was passed on to Auto-ID Labs and now big names from various sectors including names like Wal-Mart, Metro are implementing the technology whole heartedly. Some say it's just the start, what do you think?