What connects a “shopping complex or mall” and a high-tech “Library”?

You might ridicule this question but yes they use a technology which is known as “Bar code” and is common in both the institutions. A guy overheard the president of a local food chain about his interest in research of a system to automatically read product information during checkout. He was Bernard Silver who along with his friend “Norman Joseph Woodland “. This lead to a determination and perseverance which went to result into the idea of “Barcode”. On October 7, 1952, inventors Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver were granted the first patent for their invention.

This optical machine-readable representation of data were used to automate supermarket checkout systems, a task in which they have become almost universal. The retail industry thrives on this. There is a geek quotient attached to it too!

The coding of “Barcode”!

Generally, code 128 is used.

A Code 128 barcode will have six sections with varying “bar widths” and “bar spacing”.

In 1981 the United States Department of Defense adopted the use of Code 39 for marking all products sold to the United States military. This system, LOGMARS, is still used by DoD and is widely viewed as the catalyst for widespread adoption of barcoding in industrial applications.

Barcodes are read by “barcode readers” or “barcode scanners”. Normally, we are used to 1-D barcodes but they also come in patterns of squares, dots, hexagons and other geometric patterns within images termed 2D (2 dimensional) matrix codes or symbologies. The first “barcode” was concentric circles.

After reading about “barcodes”, you might be tempted to “make your own barcode”. This site does your job. Enter the “character-string” and choose your options in the GUI to come up with your “Barcode”.

Recently, Google decided to commemorate the 57th anniversary of the first ever patent on them with one of their popular doodles.

Start making your own “Barcodes”

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