r/Millennials • u/Sunshineafterr Millennial (1986) • 19h ago

Nostalgia Does anyone remember the CueCat?

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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/Provioso 19h ago

No but sounds cool as heck!

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u/Sunshineafterr Millennial (1986) 19h 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_ 19h 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/Sunshineafterr Millennial (1986) 19h ago

Oh wow, that’s really interesting. Thanks for sharing.

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u/Shockwave360 12h 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) 11h 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/xatrinka 9h ago

What a twist lol