You may have noticed that Google has replaced its logo with a barcode. Why? Well, according to The Christian Science Monitor explains that it is to celebrate the 57th anniversary of the first bar code patent. According to the site,
“On October 7, 1952, inventors Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver were granted the first patent for their invention. The only difference between the bar code we know today and the one Woodland and Silver invented was that it was comprised of a series of concentric circles, not the 59 black-and-white vertical lines synonymous with the current design.”
TechCrunch furthers the explaination by adding,
“The barcode on the Google homepage is Code 128 encoded, which is a standard way of encoding ASCII character strings (ie. A-Z, a-z, 0-9, etc.) into a barcode. It would be safe to assume that Google used their own open source barcode project, Zxing to generate the barcode. The same library is used in Android for barcode recognition.”
I’ve used barcodes ported to my iPhone to claim coupons in the real world. One merchant giggled as she scanned my phone and it actually worked. Ah, the joys of the Interwebs.
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