Barcodes

Barcode

A barcode is “A machine-readable code in the form of numbers and a pattern of parallel lines of varying widths, printed on and identifying a product.” But in truth a barcode is so much more. Barcode systems help businesses and organizations track products, prices, and stock levels for centralized management in a computer software system allowing for incredible increases in productivity and efficiency.

The lines and patterns on a barcode are actually representations of numbers and data and their development allowed basic information about a product to be easily read by an optical scanning device, a barcode scanner, and automatically entered into a computer system. This vastly reduced the time it took to record such information and eliminated the potential for human data entry error.

Bar codes started out with simple 1-dimensional designs, consisting of basic black lines that could only be read by specially designed bar code scanners. However, today bar codes come in many shapes and sizes and a wide range of designs and many can even be read by mobile phones and other devices.