A local Radio Shack gave me a case of CueCats. I used them to scan linear barcodes. I gave them away to people that wanted to read linear barcodes. I did the one-wire hack to un-encrypt the outgoing data. I still have one or two of these laying around. A couple of them were used as parts-donors for various projects.
CueCats functionality lasted longer than all my various Palm Pilots combined. You can still read barcodes on books and food, but modern phones can read many more barcodes these days.
In fact, I think hacking the :cuecat was my first foray into hacking/making/technological subversion.
I kludged together a java program to process ISBNs to create a database of all my books and I think scrape their price off amazon forā¦insurance documentation (ok, not too subversive). It saved hours, made use of my two semesters of compsci and taught me how to parse HTML. Later I extended it to VHS tapes(!) and eventually DVDs.
WikiP says the investors of the :cuecat lost $185M, but I certainly gained from it.
CueCat! The company that made them was here in Dallas. I had a friend who did some work for them, and I got a whole box of them at one time. They just plugged into the ps2 port, with a pass-thru for your keyboard. When I made my first book database, I wrote a script to parse out their input, so I could scan the barcodes. Though, they didnāt great, so I gave up after scanning in a few dozen barcodes.
Agreed. I dislike apple, but whether or not I personally like their products, many of them have been undisputedly influential to consumer tech trends. The newton and macbook air are NOT among them.
As Mosberg admits, the newton was a total failure at the time and canāt even be credited as a direct inspiration for anything that came soon after.
There has been a niche market for thin/light ultraportable laptops for nearly as long as there have been laptops. The air may have been the thinnest/lightest at the time, but there is a new thinnest/lightest every year. I maintain that if any other company had produced that exact laptop with those exact specs at that exact price, it would have sold just as poorly as every ultraportable that came before it. The only reason it did well was because it had a glowing apple on the back.
The CueCat really was a brilliant idea - you could scan codes from ads in magazines, if you happened to be reading the magazine while sitting in front of your desktop PC. For me, that happened ā¦ almost never, except occasionally if it was a computer magazine with an article about some programming tool.
But yes, I agree with the person who said the cellphone was far more radical than most of these (and Iāll rate the iPhone as far more influential than the MacBook Air.)
Thatās fair, 3Dfx did come in early, and hard, on the ā3d you can actually affordā (My Voodoo3-3000 did me good service for quite some time); but I was thinking of OpenGL because 3Dfxās āGlideā went absolutely nowhere (aside from ensuring some wrapper-related headaches for retro gaming enthusiasts), even starting to lose its luster in the later days of the company, and totally irrelevant by the time they went under. OpenGL, by contrast, started as the domain of crazy-expensive, not-particularly-influential (in the mass market; because a decently loaded SGI easily cost more than a car); but the technology is still wildly influential now that SGI is little more than a husk.
I actually regret not getting a :CueCat to play around with when I had the chance; I was amused by the companyās assertion that they retained ownership over the devices, which struck me as being similar to Ovaltine trying to assert copyright on any message encoded by the secret decoder rings that they used to give away.
Have you tried RTFA? First two sentences, emphasis mine:
This is my last column for The Wall Street Journal, after 22 years of reviewing consumer technology products here. So I thought Iād talk about the dozen personal-technology products I reviewed that were most influential over the past two decades.
SSL and SQL arenāt on there for the same reason that The Matrix and Mint Milanos arenāt on there.
Off the top of my head, it used a platter drive when most competitors were still using flash memory, which at the time meant you were lucky to fit four albums at once.
Never got a Cuecat. But didnāt it go beyond just scanning crap in papers & magazines? I remember the ads showing people watching TV with it plugged into their PC and taking the web browser to online sites when a tone was played during a newscast or sporting event. It was the days of dial-up. Didnāt someone figure out that no one was going to tie up their home phone line for hours while they watched TV or read the paper?
