Barcodes

Just over a hundred years ago in the stores there was no bar codes, or even price tags. Buyer pointed out the goods who wish to purchase. Seller called the price of its own assessment of the solvency of the buyer, as a rule, estimating its appearance. And after that, if the price of the buyer is not satisfied, it is either traded or left.

The bar code was invented in 1949 still a graduate student at Drexel University Bernard Silver. According to him, an idea he borrowed from Morse code. As he himself said: "I just extended the dots and dashes downwards and made it a narrow and wide lines." But to apply the technology on an industrial scale it was only in the late 1960s, with the advent of lasers and computers.

The first barcodes were round, t. E. Familiar to us thick and thin lines were closed in a circle. This was done in order to reduce errors during reading, and could bring the label to the scanner at any angle.

The first product with a bar code that was scanned at the checkout store June 26, 1974, was the packaging of chewing gum Wrigley JucyFruit. One of them is now stored at the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

Bar codes do not necessarily have to look like a sad sequence of black and white stripes. Some designers manage to create from them the whole work of art, without compromising the properties of the bar code readability. This trend in the design of the packages has been called «Barcode art».

There are many types of bar codes. But, by and large, the account can be divided into two groups: one-dimensional and two-dimensional. One-dimensional bar codes are familiar to us the sequence of thick and thin lines. Two-dimensional codes, in turn, is a matrix where the information is coded points and their position relative to the sides of the matrix. To read the two-dimensional barcode scanners need more complex, but they are able to store a significantly larger amount of information: up to 3 KB.

Modern smartphones typically have a program that allows you to scan different types of bar codes through the camera - this allows you to quickly identify the object. Because of this, the mass distribution of the matrix of QR-codes, which often encode product description, contact information, web links, etc. Codes are very common in the UK at the entrance to the underground, in magazine articles and a Thai restaurant in Soho in London every waiter is a t-shirt with a QR-code scanning of code will allow you to read customer reviews and get a special coupon offer.

Promotion of QR-codes is actively engaged by Google. More recently, the service short links goo.gl, it provides the ability to turn any link in the QR-code. All you need - is to add at the end of the reference «.qr»