Quick response or no response?
IDEA No 84
THE QR CODE
On 26 June 1974, at Marsh’s Supermarket in Ohio, cashier Sharon Buchanan scanned the world’s first barcode. The product was a ten-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit. The price, 67 cents.
The barcode would stay in its onedimensional format for 20 years. This all changed in the early ’90s at Denso Wave, a subsidiary of Toyota. An engineer called Masahiro Hara was tasked with creating a barcode that could hold more information than the existing format. His solution was the Quick Response (QR) code – a barcode that could be read horizontally and vertically.
Traditional barcodes are scanned by a beam of light. Hara’s version could not only hold more information but also be read digitally. The biggest ...
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