The first question someone time-traveling from 1954 to 2024 might ask is why everything has a box of black lines on it.

Barcodes were actually invented in the early 1950s, before I was born. But no one could figure out what to do with them. The idea, as is the case now, was to scan them to identify parts and equipment. But they didn’t catch on.

Until somebody figured out that they could solve the problem of what the actual price was for something bought at a supermarket.

Before that, it was those stupid stickers or those price stamps. Sometimes, there would be more than one, and the shopper had to figure out which one was right.

Then the shopper would take a cart full of stickered and stamped groceries and household products to the cash register, wait on a long line, get to the beleaguered cashier looking all over each product for the price, who would then shout to the manager when there was a missing sticker or two prices stamped on the package and, when all that was done, handing the tired shopper a narrow strip of paper with a bunch of printed prices but little or no identification of what price went with which item.

Does that sound about right to you? 

With barcodes, also called UPCs, the cashier scanned the product and rang up items a lot faster. The receipt showed what the price was for the specific product.

That led to self-checkout – the idea that the shopper him or herself could scan the products and pay without benefit of a cashier.

Barcodes were used for tickets to events, the original intention of identifying inventory and even paying tolls and giving out tickets on highways.

Their cousins are the square-shaped, odd-patterned QR code, which is used to link to restaurant menus, videos promoting a resort hotel, the guide to a museum or any number of things.

The barcode is, in reality, the universal language of the 21st century. That would have been a real head scratcher 70 years ago.