Masahiro Hara invented the QR code on a Go board break — and gave the patent away for free
bigaiguy · x · 2026-09-25
The story of Masahiro Hara, the Denso engineer who invented the QR code. Facing barcodes that held only 20 characters and workers scanning 1,000 codes a day, Hara's three-person team solved positioning with corner markers, finding the 1:1:3:1:1 black-white ratio least common in print by scanning magazines and boxes, and borrowed Go's local-reading logic for error tolerance. Released in 1994, the QR code held 7,000 digits, stored kanji, and scanned 10x faster. Denso Wave made the patent free — nobody would adopt a paid replacement for free barcodes. It became an ISO standard in 2000, and Alipay/WeChat Pay later made it ubiquitous in China.
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