As the use of barcodes spread, however, their limitations became apparent as well. The most prominent was the fact that a barcode can only hold 20 alphanumeric characters or so of information.
Users contacted DENSO WAVE INCORPORATED (then a division of DENSO CORPORATION) who were developing barcode readers at that time to ask them whether it was possible to develop barcodes that could hold more information, saying, “We'd like the capability to code Kanji and Kana characters as well as alphanumeric ones.”
Encouraged by these enthusiastic requests, a development team at DENSO WAVE embarked on the development of a new two-dimensional code, all out of their sincere desire to accommodate users' needs.