I thought this was interesting so I would like to share it with you all.
Ever since the first bar-coded item - a pack of Wrigley's gum - was scanned in 1974, the sound track of supermarkets has been the ubiquitous bleep, bleep.
Bar codes were invented in 1952 by Bernard Silver and Norman Woodland in Philadelphia. But the idea languished until 1973, when Woodland created an entire bar-code system - The Universal Product Code, or UPC - to help stores keep track of inventory and make checking out much faster.
The black bars represent a sequence of numbers. The five digits on the left designate the product's manufacturer; the five on the right, the specific product . Bar Codes look the way they do because a laser scanner reads the width of the lines to determine the digits listed underneath. The information is transmitted to a store computer, which matches the numbers to a product and a price - all in that split second bleep.