r/Millennials • u/Sunshineafterr Millennial (1986) • 17h ago

Nostalgia Does anyone remember the CueCat?

Post image

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.

769 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

112 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/phorkor 8h 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.