Our world has turned out to be an ever growing one and industrial revolution and the rise of technology have certainly made an impact in contributing towards the above mentioned fact. Technology has invaded every sphere of our lives and made us heavily depend upon it. Same holds true for barcode scanner technology. The scanner technology has revolutionized the process of inventory control. And now they are everywhere around us keeping track of product information and inventory levels. Nowadays, they are also used for adding products into gift registries. Compromisingly and inevitably no one gives a second thought about the usage of barcode scanner technology.

Most people take barcode scanners and barcode readers for granted. It is pretty rare for anyone to think about how a simple sliding of a product across the scanner counter reacts with the name tag and the price of the product appearing on the monitor by just scanning through some weird label and a code that comes along with every product we purchase.

In order to understand how the above mentioned operation works, one definitely needs to understand how barcodes are generated and how they work to identify the product itself. Barcode is nothing but information in coded form. This coded form is what we call as the barcode and every barcode is unique and it contains details about the particular product. This information is compressed, coded and printed at the back of the product using a special coding language. The scanner on the other hand reads through the bar codes and translates it to the system giving details about the product and its price which normal humans cannot understand or decipher.

This barcode language is also quite easy to understand actually. It is a combination of specific symbols which equals a series of bar lines. These bar lines come in short, long along with varying spaces between them. Every part of the collection of bar lines denotes number of characters depending upon the date the code was actually entered into the barcode software.

Barcode software is in fact the basic initial point or primary stage of every barcode generation as well as barcode scanners systems. Without this software, the procedure that was mentioned above is absolutely impossible to be performed. Programmers use this software to enter details about a particular product and the system generates a barcode value or details for that particular product. A sophisticated database is maintained to store details regarding every product as well as important files for the barcode software to function smoothly. This helps to keep track of products available in stock and out of stock, expiry details and other important facts about the products. It also enables smooth functioning and speeds up the updating process of the prices of these products.

Whenever the scanner reads a particular barcode, it tries to match it with the barcodes available within the database and finds out required information about the particular product. This system has made it practically possible to simultaneously take care of several customers in various supermarkets. In general it has made life quicker and comfortable.

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