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Google's new logo is a bar code which, as far as we can tell, says "Google." Today is the 57th anniversary of the first patent on the bar code. Inventors Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver filed the patent on October 1949, and it was granted, No. 2,612,994, on October 7, 1952. The original patent was for a system that would encode data in circles (a bullseye pattern), so that it could be scanned in any direction.

The bar code on the Google homepage is Code 128 encoded, which is a standard way of encoding ASCII character strings into a bar code.

The bar code is a technical innovation that has become an often unnoticed, yet essential, part of modern day life. The format is a global standard, where a scanner from any manufacturer can interpret almost any conforming bar code from anywhere (assuming it can interpret the encoding format which is UPC in the case of products, and Code 128 or something else for other applications, depending). The bar code is a great example of why uniform protocols and standards serve a greater good for everybody, and the same lesson certainly applies to the Web.

Read the whole story at The Washington Post.

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