The first patent for a bar code type product was issued to inventors Joseph Woodland, Jordin Johanson and Bernard Silver on October 7, 1952. Its implementation was made possible through the work of Raymond Alexander and Frank Stietz, two engineers with Sylvania (who were also granted a patent), as a result of their work on a system to identify railroad cars using the Automatic Car Identification system. It was not until 1966 that barcodes were put to commercial use and they were not commercially successful until the 1980s.

While traditionally barcode encoding schemes represented only numbers such as the twelve digits of product identifiers called UPCs, newer symbologies add new characters such as uppercase letters, or even the complete ASCII character set. The drive to encode more information in combination with the space requirements of simple barcodes led to the development of matrix codes (a type of 2D barcode), which do not consist of bars but rather a grid of square cells (see images at right). In contrast, a longer-lived technology called Stacked barcodes are a compromise between true 2D barcodes and linear codes (also known as 1D barcodes), and are formed by taking a traditional linear symbology and placing it in an "envelope" that allows multiple rows

• Practically every item purchased from a grocery store, department store, and mass merchandiser has a barcode     on it. This greatly helps in keeping track of the large number of items in a store and also reduces instances of     shoplifting (since shoplifters could no longer easily switch price tags from a lower-cost item to a higher-priced     one). Since the adoption of barcodes, both consumers and retailers have benefited from the savings generated.
  
• Document Management tools often allow for barcoded sheets to facilitate the separation and indexing of     documents that have been imaged in batch scanning applications.
  
• The tracking of item movement, including rental cars, airline luggage, nuclear waste, mail and parcels.
  
• Recently, researchers have placed tiny barcodes on individual bees to track the insects' mating habits.
  
• Many tickets now have barcodes that need to be validated before allowing the holder to enter sports arenas,     cinemas, theatres, fairgrounds, transportation etc.
  
• Used on automobiles, can be located on front or back.

• Fast-selling items can be identified quickly and automatically reordered to meet consumer demand,
      Slow-selling items can be identified, preventing a build-up of unwanted stock,
• The effects of repositioning a given product within a store can be monitored, allowing fast-moving more     profitable items to occupy the best space,
  
• Historical data can be used to predict seasonal fluctuations very accurately.
  
• Items may be repriced on the shelf to reflect both sale prices and price increases.
  
• Besides sales and inventory tracking, barcodes are very useful in shipping/receiving/tracking.
  
• When a manufacturer packs a box with any given item, a Unique Identifying Number (UID) can be assigned to     the box.
  
• A relational database can be created to relate the UID to relevant information about the box; such as order     number, items packed, qty packed, final destination, etc…
  
• The information can be transmitted through a communication system such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)     so the retailer has the information about a shipment before it arrives.
  
• Tracking results when shipments are sent to a Distribution Center (DC) before being forwarded to the final     destination.
  
• When the shipment gets to the final destination, the UID gets scanned, and the store knows where the order     came from, what's inside the box, and how much to pay the manufacturer.