Wish Barcode a Happy Anniversary, Bitches!

[gaypalmsprings]

Today, the usual Google logo has been replaced by the ubiquitous black-and-white barcode design to celebrate the 57th anniversary of the first barcode patent.

On October 7, 1952, inventors Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver were granted the first patent for their invention. The only difference between the barcode 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.

Earlier this year, on June 26, the barcode celebrated its 35th birthday. In 1974, a scanner in a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, met the simple black-and-white striped barcode design tacked onto a 10-piece pack of Juicy fruit gum. Now, more than 10 billion barcodes are scanned in 25 industries and in places including airports, hospitals, and shipping centers, according to Motorola.

TechCrunch reports that the Google logo barcode spells out “Google” using Code 128, which they describe as “a standard way of encoding ASCII character strings (ie. A-Z, a-z, 0-9, etc.) into a barcode.”

Last week, on October 2, Google replaced its “G” with a drawing of activist Mahatma Gandhi, to commemorate what would’ve been his 140th birthday.

[shakermaker113]

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[sonofhal]

[shakermaker113]

PS this is what I meant to say.

[gaypalmsprings]

[nbvcide]

ya know, for a split second i thought somebody actually created one of those happy birthday threads for me based on my avatar..

{soul crushed 3 seconds later}

[nbvcide]

it's my 30th birthday btw.. i'm old now.

(P.S. i don't give a fuck, i'm totally hijacking this thread anyway... or not.)