60 Years of a Barcode Patent

I was just reminded that it has been about 60 years since the patenting of the bar code.  See this BBC article.  Today we think of it as a very humble thing, but it was the first commercially successful attempt to convert the physical into the digital.   This created all kinds of leveraging capabilities that we had not seen before.  Making shopping, interacting with and shipping products much more efficient.   It has also led to richer and more transparent data that created better analytics.   A transformational event.