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59 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.
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Q 01Where was Bernard Silver a graduate student when he overheard a grocery executive asking for automatic checkout?
Drexel Institute of Technology
Silver was a graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia in 1948 when the president of the Food Fair chain asked a dean for a way to read product data automatically at checkout.
Q 02What was wrong with Woodland and Silver's first working system, which used ultraviolet ink?
The ink faded too easily and was expensive
The ink faded too easily and was expensive, so Woodland left his studies and moved into his father's Florida apartment to keep refining the idea.
Q 03Woodland formed his first barcode by drawing in what?
Sand on a beach
Woodland drew the first barcode in sand on a beach in Miami: he extended Morse code dots and dashes downward into narrow and wide lines.
Q 04Woodland later decided the code would scan better from any direction if printed in what shape?
A circle
A circle of concentric rings, the 'bull's eye', appeared in the October 1949 patent application beside the linear version, because it reads the same from any direction.
Q 05Woodland recalled Morse code from his training with which organization?
The Boy Scouts
Woodland learned Morse code as a member of The Boy Scouts; during World War II he served as a technical assistant on the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge.
Q 06Under what number was Woodland and Silver's 1952 'Classifying Apparatus and Method' registered?
2,612,994
US Patent 2,612,994 was granted on 7 October 1952 for the 'Classifying Apparatus and Method' application filed on 20 October 1949.
Q 07Which company bought the Woodland-Silver rights in 1962 before selling them on to RCA?
Philco
Philco bought the patent in 1962 and later resold it to RCA; IBM, Woodland's employer from 1951, had offered to buy it earlier but its offer was not accepted.
Q 08The KarTrak system of the 1960s used colored reflective stripes to identify what?
Railroad cars
KarTrak labels on railroad cars were read by trackside scanners; the Association of American Railroads made them standard in 1967 before dropping the scheme in the late 1970s.
Q 09David Collins left Sylvania to found which company, whose scanners used helium-neon lasers?
Computer Identics Corporation
Computer Identics Corporation, founded by Collins in 1968, installed one of its first two helium-neon laser scanners at a Buick plant in Flint, Michigan, in 1969 to sort transmissions on a conveyor.
Q 10Which grocery chain volunteered to test RCA's bullseye code in the early 1970s?
Kroger
Kroger volunteered a Cincinnati store for the trial; RCA's bullseye scanner went live there in July 1972 and ran for an 18-month test.
Q 11Why 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 12Which IBM engineer designed the Universal Product Code symbol chosen in 1973?
George Laurer
George Laurer, working at IBM's Research Triangle Park site in North Carolina, turned Woodland's earlier idea into the rectangular UPC symbol adopted in 1973.
Q 13On what date was the IBM UPC selected as the grocery industry standard?
3 April 1973
Q 21Which consulting firm helped the grocery industry define the numerical UPC format?
McKinsey & Company
McKinsey & Company consultants Larry Russell and Tom Wilson worked with the grocery trade associations' ad hoc committee to define the numeric format that became the UPC.
Q 22Which magazine ran a 1976 article headlined 'The Supermarket Scanner That Failed'?
Business Week
Business Week's 1976 piece captured a chicken-and-egg stall: retailers would not buy scanners until products carried codes, and makers would not print codes until stores had scanners.
Q 23The UK's first successful barcode system, in 1972, used Plessey shelf codes at which supermarket chain?
Sainsbury's
The grocery industry's symbol selection committee picked IBM's design on 3 April 1973; IBM had prepared five UPC versions, A through E, for future needs.
Q 14What was the first product ever scanned with a UPC at a retail checkout?
Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum
A 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum was the first retail UPC sale, rung up on an NCR register at 8:01 a.m. on 26 June 1974.
Q 15The first UPC scan took place at a Marsh supermarket in which Ohio town?
Troy
Marsh's store in Troy, Ohio, was picked because NCR, which built the scanner and register, was based nearby in Dayton.
Q 16How much did the first UPC-scanned item ring up for in 1974?
67 cents
The first item rang up 67 cents on an NCR register at a Marsh supermarket in Ohio at 8:01 a.m. on 26 June 1974.
Q 17How many digits does a standard UPC-A barcode contain?
12
A UPC-A holds 12 digits, each drawn as two bars and two spaces, giving 24 digit bars plus six guard bars for 30 bars in all.
Q 18What is the purpose of the final numeral in a UPC?
Error-detecting check digit
The last numeral is an error-detecting check digit: scanners recompute it from the preceding digits with a weighted sum and reject a code that does not match.
Q 19Each digit in a UPC is encoded as two bars and two spaces totaling how many units of width?
7
Each digit spans 7 modules of width split into two bars and two spaces; left-hand digits use odd parity and right-hand digits even parity, so a scanner can tell which way it read.
Q 20Which UPC consultant came up with adding human-readable numbers below the bars as a fail-safe?
Murray Eden
Murray Eden, an MIT scientist advising the UPC symbol committee, insisted on printing the digits beneath the bars so a clerk could key them in if the scanner failed.
British Railways had already perfected a system that read rolling stock at 100 mph by 1962.
Q 24Which barcode did the US Defense Department adopt in 1981 for products sold to the military?
Code 39
Code 39, invented at Intermec in 1974, became the Defense Department's LOGMARS standard in 1981, a program widely seen as the catalyst for industrial barcoding.
Q 25How many characters does the Code 39 specification define?
43
The specification defines 43 characters: the 26 uppercase letters, the ten digits and seven symbols (space, hyphen, period, $, /, + and %), with the asterisk reserved as start/stop.
Q 26Which barcode symbology carries the GTIN on shipping cartons and outer cases?
ITF-14
ITF-14 is an Interleaved 2 of 5 symbol, printed inside a thick bearer-bar frame, that carries the 14-digit GTIN on cases and cartons.
Q 27Codabar, developed by Pitney Bowes in 1972, was adopted for which two kinds of documents?
FedEx airbills and blood bank forms
Codabar's self-checking design reads reliably from dot-matrix multi-part forms, which is why FedEx airbills and blood bank forms adopted it.
Q 28The EAN-13 barcode used outside North America is an extension of UPC-A with what added?
An optional country-of-registration prefix
EAN-13 adds an optional country-of-registration prefix: its leading digits identify the national numbering organisation the manufacturer joined, not necessarily where the product was made.
Q 29Which EAN prefix has been reserved since the 1980s for books identified by ISBN, regardless of country?
978
The 978 'Bookland' prefix lets the EAN system carry ISBNs directly instead of running a parallel numbering scheme; the 979 prefix was opened for ISBNs later.
Q 30Which British retailer announced a book numbering system in 1965 that grew into the ISBN?
WHSmith
WHSmith, with other booksellers, commissioned the nine-digit Standard Book Number in 1965; it was devised by Gordon Foster, a statistics professor at Trinity College Dublin.