It’s on your newspaper, the CD you bought yesterday, and the can of beer you opened right before you opened this thread.
WTF am I talking about? BARCODES! Yes, the 12 digit barcode made it’s debut in 1974. According to Claude Fenstermaker, who was a 21 year old assistant manager at a grocery store, a 10 pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum was the first bar coded item in the store.
I remember the public resistance when they were introduced. Folks simply didn’t want to accept that they weren’t being cheated by the store, the checkers, the Freemasons, etc. :rolleyes:
What else has induced a similar Luddite reaction by the general public?
I recall seeing a Chick (or Chick-like) tract equating bar codes with the Number Of The Beast mark from the bible. It even “explained” how the bars at the beginning, middle, and end of every code would be read as ‘6’ if they weren’t skipped by the barcode readers.
The first 7 digits are registered and give to individual vendors (i.e. all Nike product will start with the same 7 digits).
The next 5 digits are the code for the product given by the vendor.
The last digit is the “check” digit. It is used by scanning machines to verify that the scan was legitimate using the following equation- Add together all digits in the odd positions and multiply this number by 3.
Add to that number the sum of all digits in the even positions (excluding the last digit).
Whatever number you need to add to this total to make it divisable by 10 is your check digit.
E.g. 0 78914 00660 9
