Here's a bit of trivia for you. The Lake Tahoe home that was built for the inventor of the ubiquitous bar-code just sold for $25,500,000 to PeopleSoft founder David Duffield. Norman Joseph Woodland, the co-inventor of the bar code that labels nearly every product in stores and has boosted productivity in nearly every sector of commerce worldwide, recently died at the age of 91. He and Bernard Silver (think Manhattan Project) were students at what is now called Drexel University in Philadelphia when Silver overheard a grocery-store executive asking an engineering school dean to channel students into research on how product information could be captured at checkout. The only code Woodland knew was the Morse Code he'd learned in the Boy Scouts, his daughter revealed. One day, he drew Morse dots and dashes as he sat on the beach and absent-mindedly left his fingers in the sand where they traced a series of parallel lines. Dots and dashes became thick and thin lines. His idea for the barcode eventually needed IBM's invention of a laser reader.
Updated: 2013-04-08 08:36:45