This paper is about the use of barcodes, how they are used in today's world of stock control at the point of purchase and their relative advantages over more conventional methods of storing information. Bar coding by its very nature demonstrates the versatility of digitally encoded systems as opposed to their analogue counterparts including their in-build ability to allow error correction on the fly. I will go through in detail, a variety of different types of barcode, both linear and two dimensional as well as talking about the origins of the different barcode systems, how they are read, and how they work.
