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Basic information about barcodes :

About barcodes :

• History
• Applications
• Symbologies
  Scanner/symbology interaction
• Types of barcodes
  • Linear barcodes
  • stacked barcodes
  • 2-D barcodes

History

• The idea for the barcode was developed by Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver. In 1948 while graduate students at Drexel University, they developed the idea after hearing the president of a food sales company say how he wished to be able to automate the checkout process.
  
  
• One of their first ideas was to use Morse code printed out and extended vertically, producing narrow and wide bars. Later, they switched to using a "bulls-eye" type barcode with concentric stripes.
  
  
• The first barcode reader was built by Woodland and Silver in 1952. The device was not very practical, and the output went to an oscilloscope,.... It was not commercially produced. In 1962 they sold the patent to Philco,which later sold it to RCA. The invetion of the laser in 1960 allowed barcode readers to be made much more cheaply, and the development circuit made decoding of the scanned barcode practical.
• 1972 - Kroger store in Cincinnati experimented with using a "bulls-eye" barcode reader. Woodland at IBM was developing the linear barcode that wasadopted on April 3, 1973, as the Universal product code.
  
• 1992 - Woodland was awarded the National Medal of Technology by president George H.W.Bush
• 2004 - Nanosys Inc. produced nanobarcodes - nanowires consisting of alternating segments ....

Applications

• Barcodes are used wherever physical objects need to be tagged with information that is to be processed by computers. Instead of typing strings of data into a terminal, the operator only has to display the code to a barcode reader.
  
• The data contained in a barcode varies with the application. In the simplest case. an identification number is used as a database index. The EAN-13, UPC codes commonly found on retail articles work this way.
• In other case the barcode holds the complete information itself, with no need for an external database.
• The drive to encode ever more information in combination with the space requirements of simple barcodes led to the development of matrix barcodes (2D barcodes) , which do not consist of bars but rather a grid of square cells.
• Stacked barcodes are a compromise between true 2D barcodes and linear barcodes.

Symbologies

• The mapping between messages and barcodes is called symbology.
• Linear symbologies can be classified mainly by two properties :
  • Continuous vs. Discrete - characters in continuous symbologies, with one character ending with a space and the next beginning with a bar, or vice versa. Characters in discrete symbologies begin and end with bars. The intercharacter space is ignored, as long, as it is not wide enough to look like the code ends.
  • Two width vs. many width ... Bars and spaces in two wide symbologies are wide or narrow : wide bar has no significance as long as the symbology requirements for wide bars are adhered to. Bars and spaces in many-width symbologiesare all multiples of the basic width called the module.

Barcode symbologies