A man whose impact on the world is nearly unfathomable died Sunday. Alan L. Haberman, supermarket-executive-turned-barcode-champion, died in Newton Massachusetts from complications of heart and lung disease at the age of 81. While he did not invent those ubiquitous black and white stripes -- that honor belongs to Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver -- Haberman did lead the campaign to make barcodes the universal standard for electronic product encoding. He chaired the committee responsible for the designation of the zebra-like markings, which in 1973 adopted a barcode designed by George J. Laurer of IBM. In his work at the Uniform Code
