Barcodes

Have you already tried to read barcodes printed on the label of the products you find on the supermarket shelves?

Be sure that to create them was much more difficult than read them. In 1948 Bernard Silver a supermarket executive asked some Drexel Institute of Technology students to figure out how to capture product information automatically at checkout. Bernard Silver and Norman Joseph Woodland started to cogitate how that would be possible. The two worked on some preliminary ideas without great results. One day at the beach, Woodland thought about the problem; what came to his mind was Morse code. If dots and dashes could be used to send information electronically, there certainly should be a way to capture data about grocery products that could be communicated electronically.

Together with Jordin Johanson they filed for a U.S. patent in October 1949 and it was granted in 1952.

The best-known and most widespread barcode pattern is UPC (Universal Product Code) developed as a response to business needs. On June 26, 1974 at 8:01 am, Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio made history when register a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit through a hand-made laser scanner made by NCR Corp.

The UPC encodes 12 decimal digits as SLLLLLLMRRRRRRE, where S (start) and E (end) are the bit pattern 101, M (middle) is the bit pattern 01010 (called guard bars), and each L (left) and R (right) are digits.

The (L) and (R) codes for each digit are the one's complement of each other Digit (L) code (R) code:
0 0001101 1110010
1 0011001 1100110
2 0010011 1101100
3 0111101 1000010
4 0100011 1011100
5 0110001 1001110
6 0101111 1010000
7 0111011 1000100
8 0110111 1001000
9 0001011 1110100

Today barcodes also come in patterns of dots, concentric circles, and text codes hidden within images. A barcode is a machine-readable representation of information, read by optical scanners called barcode readers or scanned from an image by special software.

To be used all over the world barcodes has integrated to EAN (European Article Number), a superset of UPC, adding an extra digit to the beginning (EAN 13).

The Uniform Code Council (UCC) and the Electronic Commerce Council of Canada (ECCC) joined EAN International to create and standardized codes for every nation in the world. The first three digits of the barcode of any product represents the country, as follows:

List of GS1* country codes - *GS1 (Global Standard One) is a global organization dedicated to the design and implementation of global standards and solutions to improve the efficiency and visibility of supply and demand chains globally and across multiple sectors):

000 – 019 U.S. and Canada
020 – 029 reserved for local use (store/warehouse)
030 – 039 U.S. and Canada drugs (see U.S. National Drug Code)
040 – 049 reserved for local use (store/warehouse)
050 – 059 coupons
060 – 099 U.S. and Canada
100 – 139 U.S. and Canada (reserved for later use)
200 – 299 reserved for local use (store/warehouse)
300 – 379 France and Monaco
380 Bulgaria
383 Slovenia
385 Croatia
387 Bosnia and Herzegovina
400 – 440 Germany (440 code inherited from old East Germany on reunification, 1990)
450 – 459 Japan
460 – 469 Russia
470 Kyrgyzstan
471 Taiwan
474 Estonia
475 Latvia
476 Azerbaijan
477 Lithuania
478 Uzbekistan
479 Sri Lanka
480 Philippines
481 Belarus
482 Ukraine
484 Moldova
485 Armenia
486 Georgia
487 Kazakhstan
489 Hong Kong SAR
490 – 499 Japan
500 – 509 United Kingdom
520 Greece
528 Lebanon
529 Cyprus
530 Albania
531 FYR Macedonia
535 Malta
539 Republic of Ireland
540 – 549 Belgium and Luxembourg
560 Portugal
569 Iceland
570 – 579 Denmark, Faroe Islands and Greenland
590 Poland
594 Romania
599 Hungary
600 – 601 South Africa
603 Ghana
608 Bahrain
609 Mauritius
611 Morocco
613 Algeria
616 Kenya
618 Côte d'Ivoire
619 Tunisia
621 Syria
622 Egypt
624 Libya
625 Jordan
626 Iran
627 Kuwait
628 Saudi Arabia
629 United Arab Emirates
640 – 649 Finland
690 – 695 China PR
700 – 709 Norway
729 Israel
730 – 739 Sweden
740 Guatemala
741 El Salvador
742 Honduras
743 Nicaragua
744 Costa Rica
745 Panama
746 Dominican Republic
750 Mexico
754 – 755 Canada
759 Venezuela
760 – 769 Switzerland and Liechtenstein
770 Colombia
773 Uruguay
775 Peru
777 Bolivia
779 Argentina
780 Chile
784 Paraguay
785 Peru
786 Ecuador
789 – 790 Brazil
800 – 839 Italy, San Marino and Vatican City
840 – 849 Spain and Andorra
850 Cuba
858 Slovakia
859 Czech Republic
860 Serbia and Montenegro
865 Mongolia
867 North Korea
869 Turkey
870 – 879 Netherlands
880 South Korea
884 Cambodia
885 Thailand
888 Singapore
890 India
893 Vietnam
899 Indonesia
900 – 919 Austria
930 – 939 Australia
940 – 949 New Zealand
950 Head Office
955 Malaysia
958 Macau
977 Serial publications (ISSN)
978 – 979 Bookland (ISBN) – 979 formerly used for sheet music
980 Refund receipts
981 – 982 Common Currency Coupons
990 – 999 Coupons

Countries not listed above are not currently on the GS1 system.

Another code widely used is the DUN-14 (Distribution Unit Number), it is not really a barcode type. It's a numbering system for shipping containers that uses other barcode symbology. The DUN-14 uses the ITF-14 (the GS1 implementation of an Interleaved 2 of 5 bar code to encode a Global Trade Item Number ) or the EAN-14 symbol set. Modern installations always use the EAN-14 to encode the DUN-14.