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What information is encoded in Amiga's 22-digit barcodes?

For example: 0103791363642010121234

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    One thought: could you be more specific in the question about what barcodes you are talking about? The ones on the case? This would make the question more complete, and mesh with your answer better.
    – user12
    Apr 24, 2016 at 3:10

2 Answers 2

17

I couldn't find this information online, so I collected and compared some serial numbers. The first three digits appear to be the location of manufacture:

  • 010 is Hong Kong
  • 012 is China
  • 401 is U.K.
  • 851 is Philippines

(However, I found some Post-Commodore Escom Amiga 1200's, all made in France, with country codes 260, 364, 464, and 564.)

The next two digits are the week number, followed by 2 digits for the year. For example, "3791" specifies September 1991. (This convention appears to have survived through the Escom era.)

The remaining digits are the product ID or model number followed by the serial number, but I don't know exactly how many digits were used for each or even if it stayed consistent through the end of Commodore.

13

The serial number, as far as I've figured it out is as follows:

AAA BB CC DDDDDD EE FF GGGGG

  • AAA is the factory location as mentioned above. In addition, 200 seems to indicate Japan, as seen on a Chinon floppy drive.
  • BB is the week. CC is the year.
  • DDDDDD represents the product number.
  • EE is somehat of a mystery to me and is usually a reasonably low number.
  • FF usually indicates hard drive size in megabytes or sometimes half of it ("60" has been seen on a 120 MB A4000). On CD32 units, this column is 10.
  • GGGGG is the actual serial number of the machine/device.

There are some other numbers similar to these. PCB labels start with 010 or 011 and seem to have the same week/year and other columns, but I haven't figured out what those represent in these numbers. Possibly the DDDDDD column also represents a product number here, which seems to match the ones on the case serial numbers.

Then we also have what I believe are service stickers starting with 051 and 052. Here, the product numbers seem to differ from the ones on the case or PCB stickers. Possibly, the DDDDDD column here represents the task being performed and the GGGGG column represents an employee number.

Last but not least, this is the result of guesswork and collection/analysis of around 60 serial numbers over the past three years. It's not official information.

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    Welcome to Retrocomputing Stack Exchange. Thanks for joining the site to post your research - I hope you stick around to answer (or perhaps ask) some more questions.
    – wizzwizz4
    Oct 18, 2017 at 21:07
  • This serial breakdown seems to also fit the Barcode stickers found on Amiga 3000 motherboards after REV 9/03. Before that time, the motherboards did not appear to ever have a barcode and instead had a yellow sticker with the WW written by hand. However, every the REV 9.03 I have seen (admittedly a small number) has the barcode sticker, and they seem to decode correctly when applying this information.
    – Geo...
    Oct 29, 2018 at 16:35

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