History of retail anti-theft alarms and security gates
September 14, 2025·Vista EAS
Half a century of retail security gates
The story starts in 1966, when Sensormatic founders Ronald Assaf and Jack Welch filed the first commercially viable EAS patent. The original system used a microwave-frequency tag that, by today's standards, would be unusable in a busy store — but it founded an entire industry.
Three eras
- 1970s–1980s: RF resonance dominates softlines; Checkpoint commercialises swept-RF tags
- 1990s–2000s: AM acoustomagnetic systems take over supermarkets; digital tuning replaces analogue trimmers
- 2010s–today: networked gates with cloud diagnostics; RFID overlays for inventory accuracy; AI-tuned filters that adapt to local noise
What changed and what did not
Frequencies have stayed remarkably stable — 8.2 MHz for RF and 58 kHz for AM remain the global standards. What has transformed is the signal processing layer: modern gates extract a usable detection from a noise floor that would have drowned 1980s hardware. Vista EAS sells equipment that benefits from every one of those five decades of refinement.
