7th October 2009 – is the anniversary of the first patent on the bar code. Inventors Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver filed the patent on October 1949, and it was granted #2,612,994 on October 7, 1952. The original patent was for a system that would encode data in circles (a bulls eye pattern), so that it could be scanned in any direction and was first created for use on train carriages.
In celebration, Google has replaced its homepage logo with a bar code. It is Code 128 encoded, which is a standard way of encoding ASCII character strings (i.e. A-Z, a-z, 0-9, etc.) into a barcode.
A traditional barcode is made up of a series of vertical bars of variable width that are scanned by a laser. This optical reader converts the information into a digital format which is then processed by a computer.
However, the Uniform Product code we use today to keep track of billions of items around the world, was invented by IBM engineer George Laurer in 1973.
