It was the year 1948. A supermarket executive approached the Drexel Institute of Technology, Philadelphia to get  a technology that could encode information about its products. Bernard Silver and N. Joseph Woodland, two graduate students, took the challenge. Woodland dropped out of school to concentrate on this. He sat on the Miami beach that winter. He dragged his fingers in the sand. He got the idea of a series of different lines of different widths that functioned like elongated versions of the dots and dashes of Morse Code. In other words, a bar code. The man who gave us barcodes expired on Dec. 9, 2012.