Barcode technology was invented in 1948 by Bernard Silver at Drexel University to provide a rapid and efficient way to represent data by varying the widths and spacings of parallel lines. The first working system used ultraviolet ink but it faded too easily. Later, barcodes were improved and became a machine-readable representation of data attached to objects. Barcodes are now used widely in retail, warehousing, shipping and other industries to automatically identify products and collect data. They provide advantages such as increased speed, accuracy and information storage compared to manual identification systems.