We can cover two letters of the alphabet here—those pesky QR codes! Everything has a QR code! It’s found on can goods, fresh produce, clothing, shoes, furniture, packaging labels, even on menus—need to price an item, better have one of those little black/white squares.
The QR code system was invented in 1994, at the Denso Wave automotive products company, in Japan.[5][6][7] The initial alternating-square design presented by the team of researchers, headed by Masahiro Hara, was influenced by the black counters and the white counters played on a Go board;[8] the pattern of position detection was found and determined by applying the least-used ratio (1:1:3:1:1) in black and white areas on printed matter, which cannot be misidentified by an optical scanner.[9][5] The functional purpose of the QR code system was to facilitate keeping track of the types and numbers of automobile parts, by replacing individually-scanned bar-code labels on each box of auto parts with a single label that contained the data of each label. The quadrangular configuration of the QR code system consolidated the data of the various bar-code labels with Kanji, Kana, and alphanumeric codes that were printed onto single label.
