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In 1992, on a factory floor in a Toyota auto-parts subsidiary in Japan, workers were drowning in barcodes.
They were everywhere: some components on the line needed ten barcodes just to capture all the tracking data. Employees scanned them, one by one, hundreds of times a day.
Masahiro Hara, an engineer on the barcodes team at Denso, the subsidiary, tackled the problem. What if, he reasoned, you could build a barcode in two dimensions instead of one? You could pack it with information, cutting the number of scans from ten to one on every item.
