According to an article on the history of QR codes from The Mainichi, Japan’s national daily newspaper, QR codes, or Quick Response Codes, were invented in 1994 by a team of researchers headed by Masahiro Hara. Denso Wave decided that QR codes should be available to anyone who wanted to use them and released the specifications publicly. The use of QR codes continued to rise over the next two decades as companies realized some of the potential of these fuzzy boxes. Now, one might be thinking I can’t possibly understand how QR codes were popularized in 2020; whatever could’ve happened. Beyond the security concerns, QR codes are having an active effect on our society as a whole, an impact that must be properly understood.