Barcode today turned 57 years old

The idea of ​​marking as much as possible adapted for machine reading came to mind to many people, but the first successful version was developed by two American students from Drexel University. In 1948, Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver heard the president of a trading company complaining about the lack of an automatic identification system for goods in their warehouses. Friends immediately thought about the simplest code - Morse code. To put the points and dashes on the paper better recognized, the students decided to “stretch” them up and down, getting a set of vertical stripes of different thickness. This was the barcode, now familiar to every person.

The patent was received on October 7, 1952. In this regard, after 57 years, google has changed its logo.

Encoded there, of course, the word "google". Encoding code 128 is used.

To decode the barcode, I used http://zxing.org/w/decode.jspx .

Some more stories:

In the same year, while working at IBM, friends tried to make a barcode scanner. A photocell from a film projector that reads a sound track from a film was taken as a detector, and a 500-watt lamp was used to illuminate the samples. The device, although it worked, was not suitable for practical use for a number of reasons, one of which was the frequent burning of paper with a too powerful lamp.
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Only the invention of the laser in 1960, which allowed creating the necessary light sources, made bar-scanners suitable for the mass market. Unfortunately, lasers fell in price only by the 1970s, and two friends sold their patent in 1962, without receiving a cent of recoil from it.

In 1972, the Kroger chain of stores (Cincinnati) first tried to introduce a circular bar code system. However, when printing such marking was easily smeared, and the experiment was stopped. On June 26, 1974, the first product in the world — ten packs of chewing gum — was sold through a cash register with a bar code scanner in a supermarket in the city of Troy (Ohio). By some miracle, one of them was not chewed, and now it is kept in the Smithsonian Museum of American History. In 1992, President George W. Bush awarded Norman Woodland with an honorary medal for his services to the people. Unfortunately, his co-author Bernard Silver did not live to this point, having died in 1963.