Retro Gadgets: CueCat
“You kids use the Internet, doncha?”
It was 1999. Mike and I were visiting my grandfather in Billings, Montana. He handed us a white plastic cat with a PS/2 connector at the end of its tail.
“What is it?” I held the plastic barcode scanner in my hand. My grandpa seemed proud to produce something that we computer kids had never seen. Mike piped up, “Is that a CueCat?” He took it out of my hand and turned it over.
My grandpa smirked. “They sent it to me because I have IBM stock.” Mike immediately explained that we were supposed to connect it to our computer so we could scan in magazine ads and it would automatically load up the URL.
“Why wouldn’t I just type the URL into the computer?” I asked. Mike shrugged and smiled. “I KNOW it’s the most useless thing! I heard some people are taking them apart and using them for normal barcode scanners, though.” Visions of kids playing grocery store at home ran through my head. I looked at my grandfather’s eyes. He was so proud to be able to produce such a strange treasure.
You can find out more about it here:
The CueCat (trademarked :CueCat) is a cat-shaped handheld barcode reader developed in the late 1990s by the now-defunct Digital Convergence Corporation, which connected to computers using the PS/2 keyboard port and later USB. The CueCat enabled a user to open a link to an Internet URL by scanning a barcode – called a “cue” by Digital Convergence – appearing in an article or catalog or on some other printed matter. In this way a user could be directed to a web page containing related information without having to enter a URL. The system that supported this is no longer in operation.
Because we never throw anything away, we still have our CueCat…
Somewhere…
