They finally received their patent in October 1952, and while the idea was intriguing to a number of companies and industries, the scanning technology, which would eventually allow the barcode to become one of the most ubiquitous symbols in the world did not yet exist. On October 20, 1949, Woodland and Silver filed a patent application for a “Classifying Apparatus and Method” - the first barcode concept. Months earlier, Silver had overheard the president of a grocery chain appeal to the dean of Drexel University to help him devise a system to automate the grocery checkout process.
#HOW TO CONVERT NUMBERS TO BARCODE CODE#
Woodland had been thinking about the ways Morse code might be used to solve a problem his colleague Bernard Silver had presented to him.
It all started in 1949 on a beach when Joseph Woodland, a mechanical engineer at Drexel University, drew a set of parallel lines in the sand that “represented a kind of ‘long form’ of dots and dashes” or Morse code. It is an ever changing story, as the technology behind the barcode is constantly evolving, and we discover ways to put more and more information into these “machine-readable” codes. The barcode has a long and interesting history from its initial development nearly 70 years ago through today. However, today barcodes come in many shapes and sizes and a wide range of designs and many can even be read by mobile phones and other devices. This vastly reduced the time it took to record such information and eliminated the potential for human data entry error.īarcodes started out with simple 1-dimensional designs, consisting of basic black lines that could only be read by specially designed barcode scanners. The lines and patterns on a barcode are actually representations of numbers and data and their development allowed basic information about a product to be easily read by an optical scanning device, a barcode scanner, and automatically entered into a computer system.
#HOW TO CONVERT NUMBERS TO BARCODE SOFTWARE#
Barcode systems help businesses and organizations track products, prices, and stock levels for centralized management in a computer software system allowing for incredible increases in productivity and efficiency.
What is a barcode ? A barcode is “A machine-readable code in the form of numbers and a pattern of parallel lines of varying widths, printed on and identifying a product.” But in truth a barcode is so much more. Yet barcodes play a crucial role in the effective and efficient operation of our economy, from small businesses to large multinational conglomerates. Every time we purchase something we interact with a barcode, but rarely do we give them much notice.
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