IN A SELF-CONFESSED ACT of attempted sabotage, the April 1978 cover of the American satirical magazine MAD was entirely devoted to a barcode. Angry at the Government’s imposition that magazines should henceforth be ‘defaced with this yecchy UPC [Universal Product Code] symbol’, the always-subversive creators of MAD hoped that the giant code would ‘jam every computer in the country’.
Inside the magazine it was predicted that the as-yet not universally used UPC symbol would eventually ‘eliminate surly cashiers who take forever, make mistakes and