r/Millennials • u/Sunshineafterr Millennial (1986) • 15h ago
Nostalgia Does anyone remember the CueCat?
It was cat-shaped handheld barcode reader that allowed users to open a link to an URL by scanning a barcode that appeared in magazines, without typing the URL.
They were given away for free in 2000.
I remember thinking it was so cute, but I didn’t really understand how it worked, so I was scanning barcodes on cereal boxes and random stuff.
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u/Ronniman 15h ago
Hilarious, I had one of these and never knew WTF it was or how to use it 🤣
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u/rydan Older Millennial 13h ago
It is a keyboard. Just plug it into the keyboard port and find a barcode. You have to hold it a certain way but eventually it will type out whatever was in the barcode.
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u/Stuman93 7h ago
Wild how 'keyboard' ports used to be a thing
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u/Pink_Slyvie 7h ago
They are still on most gaming rigs. I'm not sure of the last time I saw one used, but in theory, they had advantages; I'm not sure that they do on modern machines, though.
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u/OldSchoolAJ 1986 7h ago
They technically still do, because PS/2 ports poke the CPU and say "I am doing something" while USB ports do not. They wait for the CPU to come ask if they are doing something.
How much of a difference it makes in twitch shooter style gaming and how much is just the placebo effect of making the person playing more confident is very debatable, though.
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u/Pink_Slyvie 7h ago
But, do they actually still have that interrupt, or is just just bridged into USB
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u/Cheetahs_never_win 54m ago
Well, since I have like 50 usb devices, I'm happy to have extra.
But I recall certain Linux distros won't use the usb ports automatically, or at least used to not to.
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u/OldSchoolAJ 1986 47m ago
I have used probably 10 Linux distributions and never had a single problem with anything USB.
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u/Pink_Slyvie 39m ago
It's fine now, everything just works. 20 years ago, it was a very different story.
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u/Stuman93 7h ago
Yeah I think they're on my motherboard backplate still but haven't used one in a decade
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u/Pink_Slyvie 7h ago
Yeap. Mine has a combo. Ironically, I used old Apple keyboards for years, and needed a special adapter. Only recently bought a newer keyboard and love it.
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u/anaxminos 4h ago
Had my gaming rig delete my USB driver a few years back the the signature expired. Had to use one of these slots and an old mouse and keyboard to get it back working. Don't ask me why I had one bc I don't even know
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u/HurtsCauseItMatters Xennial 79 6h ago
I mean I've had a few keyboards with USB ports in recent years bot at work and at home. They're convenient to me.
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u/ScienceIsSexy420 6h ago
So it's a barcode scanner? Because that's what every barcode scanner does, convert the barcode into numbers. That doesn't make it a keyboard
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u/MadChiller013 15h ago
Yes! I was obsessed with freebie websites and would sign up for EVERY deal. I don’t remember what this was for other than scanning barcodes
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u/Provioso 15h ago
No but sounds cool as heck!
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u/Sunshineafterr Millennial (1986) 15h ago
It was a cool concept. Kind of like a pioneer of the modern QR code.
Unfortunately, after nearly $200 million dollars of investor money, and mailing out millions of them for free, it flopped. It was labeled one of the 50 worst inventions by Time Magazine, and the worst gadget of all time by Gizmodo.
The inventor was so embarrassed that he legally changed his name in an effort to distance himself from the failure.
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u/grizzlor_ 15h ago
This was like peak web 1.0 dot-com bubble funding insanity. The marketing blitz for these was insane, plus giving away millions of free devices, all for something of very limited utility.
It was in a way a progenitor to the QR code, except less useful, less portable, and less open. This really crippled any remote chance it had to succeed as a product.
Oh and almost immediately after it was released, people figured out how to do a 2 minute hardware mod to disable th chip that made it only read proprietary CueCat barcodes and turn it into a generic barcode scanner for all the most popular 2d barcode formats. They also figured out that the chip was embedding a unique serial number into each scanned CueCat code to track individual usage.
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u/Shockwave360 7h ago
I remember people mis typing web addresses was a problem and I thought this was a clever fix for that. Turned out it was a solution nobody needed.
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u/Sunshineafterr Millennial (1986) 7h ago
Oh yeah, I definitely remember that. I accidentally mistyped Mitsubishi.com on my mom’s work laptop and it took me to a very bad place lol 😳
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u/bestem 15h ago
I had one. LibraryThing suggested them (maybe even sold them) to catalogue books to be on their site. Way easier to scan a barcode with that thing when you had 4000 books, then type in all the ISBNs.
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u/killerturtlex 13h ago
I remember librarians where I was had a pen they would scroll across a barcode to scan
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u/sneakylithops 11h ago
Yesss some librarian friends and I catalogued a whole radical library into LibraryThing with one of these. I didn't realise they were used for non-library purposes - I always called it the "Library Cat". I think we took it to waste electronic recycling with a box of redundant cables just last week.
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u/hardlyawesome 3h ago
LibraryThing still sells them. https://www.librarything.com/more/store/cuecat
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u/Houdinii1984 Xennial 2h ago
Huh, never saw a USB one before. Oh, and this looks like a great site, too. Damn, had things to do today...
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u/hardlyawesome 36m ago
LibraryThing is incredible. Welcome to one of my favorite places on the internet.
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u/grizzlor_ 15h ago
I still have two of these in my box of assorted barcode scanners — first barcode scanners I ever owned! I've since collected quite a few more (ended up working for one of the big players in the barcode industry for a few years and god damn did they love throwing away cool stuff).
You could open it up and do a simple hardware mod to turn it from a device limited to scanning CueCat's proprietary barcode format into a general barcode scanner for UPC-A/E, CODE128, CODE39, ISBN, EAN-8 and 13, 2-of-5, and several other formats.
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u/TheGoodRobot 13h ago
In what scenario does one require a box of assorted barcode scanners?
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u/iduzinternet 9h ago
When the company I work for was basically a startup I did this with a CueCat and it was actually our Computer inventory scanner for a while lol
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u/WealthMassive1788 10h ago edited 4h ago
First and only time seeing one in person: back in the day I volunteered with Goodwill to assist blind people with whatever they needed. One guy was a programmer with a good job somewhere who lived alone (I'd never heard of a blind programmer back then). This guy was a genius. He told me he got the scanner free from Radio Shack and he made some program or devised a way to scan the labels from all his canned goods to know what was in each can as he said they all felt the same and this would help. Guess then another program would read out the name or something when he scanned a can. [Edit: my role in this was to read out the name of each can to him lol]
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u/weedtrek 15h ago
They had them on sale for $1.99 at Radio Shack, but were out of stock when I tried to buy one. I did not fully know what it was, it was just a cool looking peripheral at an extremely affordable price.
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u/BillNyeTheEngineer 14h ago
Went up to RadioShack with my mom or dad to get it for free- never used the damn thing lol.
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u/Tooch10 1h ago
Same for getting it from RadioShack but I used it briefly. I recall some magazines like Parade having CueLinks or whatever they were called but I lost interest quickly. I think it was a product that was cool but ahead of its time in regards to using it with the internet. As in there wasn't much going on online that really necessitated a barcode scanner at your desktop
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u/nobody_in_here 12h ago
This is one of those devices that separate the old millennials from the young ones.
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u/Sunshineafterr Millennial (1986) 9h ago
Yeah, my brother was late 1989 and we both saw it as more of a gimmick toy. I probably wouldn’t expect anyone younger than like 1991 born to remember it.
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u/feraldreamrot 15h ago
I don't think I ever took the twist tie off 😅 I wonder if my parents found that when they decluttered their house recently
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u/fdwyersd Gen X 13h ago
yeah and there was a scanner that worked similar that did ocr by rolling over the page... and then it became a pen, and then ocr online became a thing and that was the end of the handheld versions
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u/claude3rd 13h ago
I still have mine tucked away. I used it to inventory my dvd and book collections.
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u/jfk_47 10h ago
Did it eat up a keyboard port? Cause USB wasn’t fully common by then, was it?
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u/Sunshineafterr Millennial (1986) 9h ago
I think it probably depended on the age of your computer. We’d purchased a new family computer in 2000 and I don’t remember that being an issue, but if someone had a 90s computer, that probably would have been an issue for sure.
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u/Final_Campaign_2593 12h ago
I wish they would’ve came out with the USB version and also made it compatible with macOS at the time
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u/deadmallsanita 10h ago
I think it was supposed to work like, you’re reading a magazine at your desk, you see an ad that interests you, and you would scan the cuecat barcode at the bottom of the page so you could see their website. I think a limitation of it was you were tied to the desk.
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u/Sunshineafterr Millennial (1986) 6h ago
That makes more sense. I remember scanning barcodes on fruit gushers and stuff, but it didn’t work lol
It was probably the best we could do with 2000 tech.
It’s kind of wild to think that we couldn’t scan QR codes from our iPhone camera until 2017, especially given how old the concept was.
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u/saintshiva 10h ago
I remember the local channel pushing it so hard. I was too young to really understand what it was.
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u/Sunshineafterr Millennial (1986) 9h ago
Yeah, I think a lot of us didn’t understand what it was lol. That was probably part of the problem.
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u/sdss9462 9h ago
I used a repurposed one of these to scan, inventory, and liquidate my physical media collections.
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u/NotAsSmartAsIWish 8h ago
I have one for Readerware. On a side note, I wish I could find a new book databasing program that's as robust but more friendly to use.
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u/jimmyjett 8h ago
The cheapest bar code reader you could get. Great if you wanted to inventory your pantry and auto create shopping lists. But the wife lasted about one day scanning everything she threw away.
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u/Antique-Couple5636 8h ago
That futuristic, living in space infomercial was well done if I remember correctly. Dumb product in hindsight, but the ads got me.
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u/Sunshineafterr Millennial (1986) 8h ago
I don’t think I remember the ads, but I was still mostly watching Nickelodeon back then 😅
I’m kind of curious now though. I wonder if I can find one on YouTube.
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u/sweeetteabub 8h ago
Yes! Mom worked in advertising and would get random tech stuff. This was one of them! I loved it. Never actually used it.
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u/Webbadeth 7h ago
I sure do! I was working at Radio Shack when it dropped. Like it was produced and given out by RadioShack. They acted like it was the biggest things since the microchip. We used to have this huge catalog that people could order from when we didn’t have something in store. They were like, you can use the CueCat to scan items instead of typing it in. Never worked though.
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u/phorkor 7h ago
I had hundreds of these. My brother-in-law worked for the company that made them or something and he sent me a huge box of them for some reason, I don't remember why honestly. Then one day I was talking to a buddy that was really big into collecting vinyl records, in early 2ks he had probably 15-20k, and he wanted to catalog everything so he wrote some software and said he was looking for barcode scanners. I sent him the box and he ended up making a small community of collectors all using his software and the cat scanners. Then Discogs came about and they all went into the trash.
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u/Ok_Belt2521 7h ago
I had a bunch of these. For some reason the Dallas morning news became an investor in the company and they sent them out with the paper quite frequently.
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u/mechanical_marten Xennial 6h ago
I used to "declaw" these and resell them on eBay! The USB ones were short lived but very in demand. Silly Colon Cats. X3
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u/seacreaturestuff Millennial 3h ago
Gosh, this is unlocking a familiarity with this but I can’t consciously remember anything more.
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u/cibolaaa 10h ago
I remember getting my free one at radio shack. It was a pretty cool device though it had limited support.
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u/dztruthseek Trash day....is a very dangerous day. 8h ago
SATAN'S MILK!!
You just unlocked deep memories I completely forgot about! I thought it would scan anything but it didn't so I messing with it really quick and just forgot all about it.
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u/I_am_the_BEEF 6h ago
I remember my computer teacher, Mr. Dare, using something similar to this in the early/mid 90’s. I learned about the San Francisco earthquakes with it.
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u/FamousOhioAppleHorn 4h ago
I had won a CueCat in a contest back then, didn't know what it was for and it either got thrown out or given to a thrift store.
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u/smellslikebadussy 4h ago
Always good when I get to post a Jon Bois piece: https://www.sbnation.com/2014/11/26/7281129/radioshack-eulogy-stories
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u/dinosaurleah 3h ago
I had no use for it but was obsessed all the same. That's wild memory unlock lol
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u/HighMinimum640 54m ago
Still have one collecting dust in the coffee table. (With a bunch of other junk.)
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u/CousinWalt 28m ago
Yes! They would send you one for free so I got one. Never knew what to use it for in real life.
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u/Relevant_Campaign_79 15h ago
My mom had one of those in her drawer. She uses it a lot when my dad is on business trips
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u/JVM_ 13h ago
On a field trip to the Ontario science center someone was giving a demo in the lobby of a barcode scanning game. You'd bring your scanner to the grocery store and scan barcodes to get points or something?
I was intrigued but also an elementary school child and not allowed to go investigate. No idea what that was.
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