60 free Barcode trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This barcode trivia quiz tells the whole story of the machine-readable stripe: Bernard Silver overhearing a grocery executive at Drexel in 1948, Joe Woodland drawing Morse code dashes into the sand at Miami Beach, the 1952 patent nobody wanted, the KarTrak railroad labels that failed, and the morning in June 1974 when a pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit rang up 67 cents at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio. From there it covers how a UPC actually works (12 digits, 30 bars, a check digit), the EAN and GS1 system that runs global retail, ISBNs on books, Code 39 and the US military, Code 128, Codabar on blood bags and FedEx airbills, and the two-dimensional era: Denso Wave's Go-board-inspired QR code, Data Matrix, PDF417 on driver's licenses, MaxiCode on UPS parcels and RFID tags. There are also questions on barcode scanners, the 'Supermarket Scanner That Failed', Hitman's tattoo and the people who think barcodes are the Number of the Beast. Every answer has been checked against primary sources, chiefly the Wikipedia articles on barcodes, the UPC, QR codes and their inventors, and each explanation adds one more detail. Play, see your score, and share it with the tech-history fans in your group chat.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which two men are credited with inventing the barcode, patented in the US in 1952?
Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver
Their idea was Morse code extended into thin and thick bars; it took more than twenty years to become a commercial success.
Q 02Where was Bernard Silver a graduate student when he overheard a grocery executive asking for automatic checkout?
Drexel Institute of Technology
The executive was the president of the Food Fair chain, and Silver told his friend Woodland about the request.
Q 03What was wrong with Woodland and Silver's first working system, which used ultraviolet ink?
The ink faded too easily and was expensive
Woodland then quit Drexel and moved into his father's Florida apartment to keep working on the problem.
Q 04Woodland formed his first barcode by drawing in what?
Sand on a beach
'I just extended the dots and dashes downwards and made narrow lines and wide lines out of them.'
Q 05Woodland later decided the code would scan better from any direction if printed in what shape?
A circle
The 'bull's eye' pattern was described in the 1949 patent application alongside the linear version.
Q 06Woodland recalled Morse code from his training with which organization?
The Boy Scouts
He had also served on the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge as a technical assistant during World War II.
Q 07Under what number was Woodland and Silver's 1952 'Classifying Apparatus and Method' registered?
2,612,994
The application, titled 'Classifying Apparatus and Method', had been filed on 20 October 1949.
Q 08Which company bought the Woodland-Silver rights in 1962 before selling them on to RCA?
Philco
IBM, where Woodland worked from 1951, had offered to buy it earlier but the offer was not accepted.
Q 09The KarTrak system of the 1960s used colored reflective stripes to identify what?
Railroad cars
Developed at GTE Sylvania, it was adopted across North America in 1967 but proved too easily fooled by dirt.
Q 10David Collins left Sylvania to found which company, whose scanners used helium-neon lasers?
Computer Identics Corporation
One of its first two systems went into a Buick factory in Flint, Michigan in 1969 to identify transmissions on a conveyor.
Q 11Which grocery chain volunteered to test RCA's bullseye code in the early 1970s?
Kroger
The 18-month test in a Cincinnati store revealed that smeared ink made the circular code unreadable.
Q 12Why did IBM's straight-bar design beat RCA's bullseye in the 1973 selection?
Smeared ink only made it taller, not unreadable
Printers smeared ink in the direction of the stripes, so extra ink simply extended the bars while keeping them readable.
Q 13Which IBM engineer designed the Universal Product Code symbol chosen in 1973?
George Laurer
Q 21Which UPC consultant came up with adding human-readable numbers below the bars as a fail-safe?
Murray Eden
The MIT scientist also chose the font, so a clerk can key the number in if the scanner fails.
Q 22Which consulting firm helped the grocery industry define the numerical UPC format?
McKinsey & Company
Larry Russell and Tom Wilson of the firm worked with the trade associations that formed the Uniform Product Code Council in 1973.
Q 23Which magazine ran a 1976 article headlined 'The Supermarket Scanner That Failed'?
Business Week
Neither retailers nor manufacturers wanted to move first, and projected savings of $40 million did not appear on schedule.
He worked at IBM's Research Triangle Park facility in North Carolina and built on Woodland's more general idea.
Q 14On what date was the IBM UPC selected as the grocery industry standard?
3 April 1973
IBM had prepared five UPC versions, A through E, for future needs.
Q 15What was the first product ever scanned with a UPC at a retail checkout?
Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum
The 10-pack of gum rang up 67 cents on an NCR register at 8:01 a.m. on 26 June 1974.
Q 16The first UPC scan took place at a Marsh supermarket in which Ohio town?
Troy
NCR installed the test system there because it was near the factory producing the equipment.
Q 17How much did the first barcode-scanned pack of gum ring up for?
67 cents
A facsimile of the gum packet is displayed at the Smithsonian's American history museum.
Q 18How many digits does a standard UPC-A barcode contain?
12
Every UPC-A also has exactly 30 bars: six for guard patterns and 24 for the digits.
Q 19What is the purpose of the final numeral in a UPC?
Error-detecting check digit
It lets scanners and clerks catch some mistakes in scanning or manual entry.
Q 20Each digit in a UPC is encoded as two bars and two spaces totaling how many units of width?
7
Digits exist in odd and even parity forms so the code can be scanned in either direction.
Q 24The UK's first successful barcode system, in 1972, used Plessey shelf codes at which supermarket chain?
Sainsbury's
British Railways had already perfected a system that read rolling stock at 100 mph by 1962.
Q 25Which barcode did the US Defense Department adopt in 1981 for products sold to the military?
Code 39
The LOGMARS program is widely viewed as the catalyst for barcoding in industry.
Q 26How many characters does the Code 39 specification define?
43
They are the uppercase letters, ten digits and a handful of special characters such as $, / and +.
Q 27Code 128 was developed in 1981 by which company?
Computer Identics
It was David Collins's firm, the same one that put lasers into barcode scanners.
Q 28Codabar, developed by Pitney Bowes in 1972, is still used on which two kinds of documents?
FedEx airbills and blood bank forms
It was designed to be read accurately even when printed on dot-matrix printers.
Q 29The EAN-13 barcode used outside North America is an extension of UPC-A with what added?
An optional country-of-registration prefix
The prefix identifies the GS1 member organisation the manufacturer joined, not necessarily where the product was made.
Q 30Which EAN prefix has been reserved since the 1980s for books identified by ISBN, regardless of country?
978
The 'Bookland' prefix lets the EAN system catalog books by ISBN instead of running a parallel numbering scheme; 979 was added later.