Prompt Cast
The Revolution of Barcodes: How Norman Woodland Transformed Retail and Logistics
TLDR Norman Woodland's invention of barcodes revolutionized the world of retail and logistics. The modern barcode, developed by Woodland, allowed for automatic inventory management and led to cost savings for supermarkets and increased sales.
Timestamped Summary
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Norman Woodland's invention of barcodes revolutionized the world of retail and logistics.
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The need for a system to automatically read and manage inventory led to the invention of the modern barcode, which was developed by Norman Woodland after he came up with the idea while drawing lines in the sand.
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The first iteration of the barcode was a circle that could be read in any direction, but it was an idea ahead of its time and little was done with it until technology caught up 20 years later.
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The first purchase using a UPC code and barcode scanner was made in 1974, leading to cost savings for supermarkets and an increase in sales.
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A UPC code consists of 12 numbers, with 11 of the numbers used to identify a company and a product, allowing for a maximum of 100 billion unique UPC codes to be created.
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A UPC code consists of 12 digits, with 3 guard lines and 6 numbers on each side representing the actual UPC numbers, with the left numbers starting with 0 and the right numbers starting with 1, and the 12th digit serving as a checksum.
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Two-dimensional bar codes, such as QR codes, can encode far more information than one-dimensional bar codes, making them more suitable for tasks like sharing website URLs, and while a UPC bar code only contains an ID number, all the information about the product is stored in a database associated with the UPC number.
