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The Musings Of A Carbon Based Life Form

Google Celebrates the Invention of the BarCode

Barcode09
Those ubernerds at the Big "G" did it again as they pull out another useless but super interesting logo swap to highlight a great day in history. Today is no different. Rather then sending me my gonfunnit invitation code for the elusive #GoogleWave, the brainiac psycho at 
1.0 × 10100(googol) dug up this gem of knowledge.

The Barcode was invented 57 years ago today. October 7, 1952 the official patent was issued US Patent 2,612,994.

The Washington Post reports 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. It would be safe to assume that Google used their own open source barcode project, ZXing, to generate the barcode. The same library is used in Android for barcode recognition.

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