Google Celebrates Barcode 57th Anniversary
The Google Logo Today (October 7, 2009) shows a barcode on all its homepages to celebrate the first barcode patent’s 57th Anniversary (October 7, 1952).
Inventors Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver filed the patent on October 1949, and it was granted, No. 2,612,994 (pdf), on October 7, 1952. The original patent was for a system that would encode data in circles (a bulls eye pattern), so that it could be scanned in any direction.
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.
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Barcodes are cool. I was surprised to see the barcode on the front page because I have recently been creating an online barcode clock! Have a looksie!