😢 👩🏼‍🏫 👿 The unfinished history of the QR code 👱 🌇 🐞

We meet them everywhere: on the drainpipes of residential areas and subway handrails. In commercials of major brands and registration services. Even in the video game Alan Wake, QR codes, pardon the pun, “lit up” as Easter eggs with additional content.

Almost every year there are “killers” of QR codes, and they themselves are predicted a quick death. But for decades, people have continued to use these black and white squares. What for? Why? Who invented them? Let's try to figure it out under the cut.

Japan has long been famous for all sorts of inventions designed to make business processes and production tasks as compact and efficient as possible. In the early 1990s, engineers at a large engineering company Denso were faced with a tricky task: to create a unified barcode (or something similar) for part marking and component scanning. At that time, more than 10 codes for various purposes were adopted within the company, and the employees of the plant complained that working with the codes requires a lot of concentration, and the codes themselves contain extremely little useful information.