The first modern barcode was scanned 50 years ago this summer—on a 10-pack of chewing gum in a grocery store in Troy, Ohio. Fifty is ancient for most technologies, but barcodes are still going strong.

Beep. You hear it every time you buy a product in a retail store. The checkout person slides your purchase over a scanner embedded in their checkout stand, or shoots it with a handheld scanner. The ...

The barcodes that appear on almost every product bought and sold in shops around the world were born 75 years ago on a beach in Miami (Credit: Alamy) Few people think twice about the barcodes on their ...

In 1948, N Joseph Woodland - a graduate student at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia - was pondering a challenge from a local retailer: how to speed up the tedious process of checking out in his ...

While every phone can read QR codes located around you, barcode scanning is a different story altogether, and the best barcode scanner app makes it a bliss. While the process works similarly as QR ...

When you sell retail products, it's convenient and efficient to use a barcode scanner. This scanner allows you to automatically transfer information about the product to your computer system so that ...

Barcode technology makes real-time data collection possible. Despite the multitude of barcodes in existence today, universal product codes remain among the most useful to a small business. Because UPC ...

Few people think twice about the barcodes on their shopping, but in the 75 years since they were first dreamed up, they have helped save lives, gone into space and stoked fears of the Antichrist.