Bar Code Birthday
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. - The ubiquitous barcode which has become a part of our daily lives today celebrated its 57th anniversary and to commemorate the occasion, Google has put a decorated logo of a barcode on its site (similar to the one created for TKE seen below).
On October 7, 1952, inventors Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver were granted the first patent for their invention of the Bar Code. The only difference between the bar code we know today and the one Woodland and Silver invented was that it was comprised of a series of concentric circles, not the 59 black-and-white vertical lines synonymous with the current design.
Earlier this year, on June 26, the bar code celebrated its 35th birthday. In 1974, a scanner in a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, met the simple black-and-white striped bar code design tacked onto a 10-piece pack of Juicy fruit gum. Now, more than 10 billion bar codes are scanned in 25 industries and in places including airports, hospitals, and shipping centers, according to Motorola. Google users Wednesday were greeted with sign of a barcode as opposed to its traditional logo on its search site and according to the Washington Post the logo depicts Code 128 encoded.
From first used on a packet of Wrigley’s chewing gum, the barcode has today found its way to billion of items across the world and has become a key element of modern day retailing (there's even an app to convert the iPhone into a barcode reader). Initially barcodes were not readily accepted until the Universal Product Code designs were accepted by the members of the National Association of Food Chains in US.
Read more about this phenomenon by going to Google and clicking on the bar code icon. Adapted from Google, itproportal.com, and barcoding.com.
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