Co-Founder of the project here here. AMA @ggdm

I remember begging my parents to take me to a Radio Shack to get one of these when I was in second grade. The idea of being able to scan various items around the house was such a wild concept to me for some reason. Once we finally tracked one down, I scanned every book on my shelf into a trial copy of Winnebago Spectrum that I had obtained. It was the software suite that my elementary school's library ran off of, and I installed it on a Windows 2000 PC that my dad had passed down to me after upgrading the office computer. God knows how many hours I spent playing library with my younger sister and aimlessly scanning ISBNs - such simple times! Surprisingly I still have that same PS/2 CueCat in my drawer, though it hasn't been plugged in for at least fifteen years.

I know many of us in this community tend to look back at the earlier days of the internet very fondly and feel the nostalgia hit strongly, and I think it's because of the innovations (or maybe gimmicks?) like these that were novel and groundbreaking in many ways. Off the top of my head right now, I can't recall anything in recent times as quirky as the CueCat that would have evoked a similar excitement and genuine intrigue to a child today like I was fortunate to have experienced twenty years ago. But then again, I'm sure back then there weren't many seven year olds hunting down library database software and messing around with it for fun - so maybe my perspective is an outlier...

A maybe forgotten fact about the whole CueCat saga was that the hardware was given away for free, mainly at Radio Shack in the USA, with the expectation that the company would be able to recoup the costs by...um...I guess collecting user data and charging publishers to generate bar codes.

Of course, people quickly reverse engineered the data format, as it was just a PS/2 format keyboard device, which caused the company to threaten to sue[0] anyone who distributed the software. Much fun was had for a few months skirting this until nearly everyone, other than a few people like book collectors, realized that having a UPC scanner wasn't that useful and the CueCats got stuffed into the junk drawers.

Now everyone has a barcode scanner on their phone and it is no big deal, but at the time, it was a fun toy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat#Security_breach

I had one of these and thought it was pretty cool to scan the ISBN barcodes on the back of my books and make a catalog of my books. That didn’t take very long and then I wondered what I would use it for and was very confused as a 13 year old what in the world the business model could be to keep them afloat, because it made no sense to me to give them away or charge so little for the device. I was similarly confused by the various toolbars you could install that would pay you to browse the web (which I hooked up to some mouse jiggling script to keep it working while I slept). I did get at least one check for $15 from that which seemed magical at the time.

Does anyone remember how LibraryThing does (did?) sell CueCats and they are a really handy way to upload your book and music collection online

https://www.librarything.com/more/store/cuecat

One of the big purchasers of leftover CueCat inventory was Librarything. They still sell them (for $5 at the moment) on their store, and have built features to use them for cataloging and searching your books.

CuëCats were amazing. We had so much fun playing with them and scanning barcodes even though we didn’t do much useful with it.

I remember a home library program for the Mac that was probably inspired by the cuecat. It would add books to your library after doing an internet lookup for he information.

Amongst all the random detritus from 70 years of local industry, there’s basically always still a seller with a bunch of CueCats at every Silicon Valley Electronics Flea Market (https://www.electronicsfleamarket.com/).

I bought half a dozen of these from Radioshack they were more or less giving them away after the fall.

There were lots of library apps that sprung up where you could scan your DVDs barcodes, or CDs etc.

I can't remember what hair brained idea I had for it.

I'm holding my cuecat in hand with a PS/2 adapter thru a PS/2->USB adapter. Still works perfectly using Larry Wall's one-line decoder!!!

Amazing ahead of it's time product, by a very very screwed up founder.

I had a PS/2 CueCat which IIRC required some hardware modification to use unlocked, at least early on. I stuck in it a drawer and never bothered with it again. The default functionality was useless.

The thing I miss however is things like that old Amazon web service that. Icould look up book information for free. For a few years there were some really interesting free XML-RPC and SOAP web services that were relatively easy to plug into and access interesting services. I really miss those services and composability for mash-ups.

These were great. Our college IDs had a barcode on them for cafeteria charge swipes.! I set up a cuecat outside my dorm door where one could swipe their ID for access, the IDs swipes would be compared against an access list and a match triggered a mechanical door opener from a locked door. Lulz all round. This was before everyone was walking around with a cellphone camera where these barcodes were marginally more secure in 2000 but the campus switched from barcodes a few years later.

Wired Magazine gave away CueCats at one point, I still have an unopened on in the box. Along with 100 lbs or so of magazines

Related, to make the CueCat "speak English:" https://nexus.zteo.com/posts/sunday-hacking-cuecat-delicious...

Why do I keep reading about the CueCat multiple times per year?

What makes this primitive gadget so enticing?

Working RadioSnack in Berkeley, we couldn’t give them away.

I still have couple of these in a box somewhere. I recall they had a ps2 connector.

I still have my cuecat! :C