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Few objects in the world are more immediately recognizable than the bar code. After all, bar codes are all around us. They’re on the books we buy and the packages that land on our doorsteps. More than ...

George Joseph Laurer, who revolutionized check-out lines across the world by creating the universal bar code, died earlier this month at his home in Wendell. He was 94. Laurer helped create the ...

Every purchase evokes his design of the rectangular Universal Product Code. But although it became ubiquitous, he received no royalties. By Sam Roberts George J. Laurer, whose design of the vertically ...

On a June morning in 1974, a Marsh Supermarket cashier in Troy, Ohio, rang up a 67-cent pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum using something novel — the black and white stripes of a universal bar code. The ...

Bar codes are traded all over the world among companies and the codes are not a conclusive way to determine a product’s country of origin. Bar code prefixes are assigned based on the location of the ...