The concept of barcodes dates back to ancient civilizations, but the modern barcode was invented in the 1950s by Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver. Their bullseye code was the first to be developed, but it was later replaced by the Universal Product Code, or UPC, which was established as the standard in 1973. Barcodes have since become ubiquitous in modern commerce, used for stock checking, inventory maintenance, and checkout scanning.
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