Why is google a barcode today? Today is the 57th anniversary of the bar code patent. In honor of the bar code, Google is featuring those familiar black and white bars on its homepage as its doodle instead of its usual logo.

On October 7, 1952, inventors Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver were granted the first patent for their invention. The only difference between the bar code we know today and the one Woodland and Silver invented was that it was comprised of a series of concentric circles, not the 59 black-and-white vertical lines synonymous with the current design.

According to TechCrunch, the Google logo bar code spells out “Google” using Code 128, which they describe as “a standard way of encoding ASCII character strings (ie. A-Z, a-z, 0-9, etc.) into a bar code.”

This is not the first time Google changes its logo and its probably not the last time.

Google