Barcodes

The sight of barcodes on everyday household purchases has become ubiquitous. I can hardly remember a time when supermarkets weren't kitted out with barcode readers at the checkout till. But I can still just about remember it...

In fact barcodes go back much further than my lifetime, to 1948, when their American inventor had a flash of inspiration on a beach and stretched out the dots & dashes of Morse code with his toe in the sand. But it took a long time for them to be adopted as a standard way of identifying products on supermarket shelves.