Barcodes

Barcodes

 The barcode, now so much part of our everyday lives we hardly notice them, but they must be one of the most common printed images we will see, nothing is free from its own unique code.

The idea, according to a quick web search, was that of Bernard Silver in 1948, he joined the dots in a Morse Code and formed the first "barcode". It wasn't until 1974, June 26th, that a UPC barcode on a pack of Wrigley`s Juicy Fruit chewing gum was first commercially scanned. Even though by 1975, 75% of packaging carried a barcode, only around 200 stores had any way of scanning them!, although by 1980, 8,000 stores a year were adopting the idea. The real catalyst came in 1981 when the US Department of Defense took up the UPC code for marking all products sold to the US Military.