Once upon a time there was a tech-industry boom. And the boom begat many follies. And among the most insane of those follies was a thing called the Cuecat. The idea was that actually typing in a URL from a print magazine ad was so laborious that, instead, you’d happily plug in a free (but ridiculously complicated to install) bar-code scanner to your PC and run that scanner over the magazine page to take you to a URL. (Of course this would limit your magazine reading to within a yard of your computer, but…never mind.) Absurd as this scheme was, its promoter somehow managed to raise tens of millions of dollars from respectable corporations that should have known much better.
I reviewed this misbegotten gizmo back in fall of 2000 when Wired magazine sent one to each of its subscribers. I predicted a future of filling landfills for the ill-fated devices, and assumed that they had long ago added their mass to some forlorn waste zone. But it seems that even the dumps would not take the Cuecats, and now two million of them are being auctioned off by a surplus house.
Help save the abandoned Cuecats! It wasn’t their fault that their creators were digital con artists. Don’t abandon them to a fate of disuse! You can help save these Cuecats — or you can turn the page. Why, they’re only 30 cents each!
Oops, there’s a 500K minimum order. Forget it.
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