4 ms·

> The CueCat read normal barcodes. It read them better than it read the weird slanted ones that were associated with it. My recollection (and I may still have

> The CueCat read normal barcodes. It read them better than it read the weird slanted ones that were associated with it. My recollection (and I may still have one of those things in the basement somewhere) was that you plugged it in inline with your PS2 keyboard and when you scanned a normal barcode it just spit it out as if you had typed the number on your keyboard. Like if you were typing a term paper in MSWord and your annoying roommate snuck in and started scanning things, you'd have a whole lot of random pieces of barcodes in between words. A cuecat was a second keyboard, as far as your computer was concerned. No software needed, no firmware updates, nothing. No need to do anything at all with the provided CD. And that was the problem, as people who wanted a barcode scanner could just go grab a free one from Radio Shack. Some people were visiting every single Radio Shack within driving distance grabbing as many as the hapless employees were willing to give them.

PaulHoule 4y ago
Yep. The cuecat worked by making keystrokes. The trouble with your analysis is I think few people wanted a barcode scanner back then and the ones that did wanted a reliable barcode scanner. A $40 barcode scanner you buy off ebay from a chinese manufacturer is not going to save you any time or hassle by scanning UPC codes although it might do OK with QR codes. A Cuecat was much worse.
banana_giraffe 4y ago
I didn't send the number. It sent a (base64, IIRC) encoded version of the barcode, along with a serial number for tracking purposes. It was fairly quickly reverse engineered, but never quite as simple as some of the contemporary barcode scanners that just entered raw numbers.
- morelisp 4y ago
  IIRC there was a trivial short to disable the b64 and ID. That and installing a power switch was my first ever real soldering project.
  - diggernet 4y ago
    Yeah, exactly. I was puzzled about the talk of Windows-only and hacked software. I soldered on a jumper wire (with a slide switch to easily revert back if needed) and used it as a barcode reader in FreeBSD.
RulerOf 4y ago
>A cuecat was a second keyboard, as far as your computer was concerned. That's how every USB barcode reader I've used worked too. While the approach is certainly very compatible, it left configuration of the device's behavior to be very esoteric. If I wanted to change the key sequence that followed, I had to scan these special programming barcodes[1] to alter its behavior... which is something I never got to work. 1: https://help.eyefinity.com/omew/Barcodes/Programming_Your_Barcode.htm https://help.eyefinity.com/omew/Barcodes/Programming_Your_Ba...
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  I have one that can be configured to either pretend to be a keyboard or pretend to be a serial device. In terms of reading barcodes though it is absolute rubbish.
squarefoot 4y ago
> when you scanned a normal barcode it just spit it out as if you had typed the number on your keyboard. Many barcode readers work like that, it's called something along "keyboard emulation". Back in the day I wrote a Clipper program for a bookstore whose #1 need was to be able to scan ISBN barcodes of books being bought and sold as quick as possible during that short period before or after summer when they sell new school books editions, and customers wait in long lines outside. The clerk couldn't waste a single second pushing this or that button to tell the software "this comes from the keyboard" or "this from the reader", so I programmed the reader to precede any code being read by a non printable sequence that couldn't have been written on the keyboard but the software would recognize as "what follows must be a barcode". By doing so, adding or removing books to/from the inventory was just a matter of scanning the book code, which would trigger a search function on the database, and pressing the relevant function key (add, remove, sell, order, etc). (This ran on two networked 486s that managed a 90k+ record database with multiple and composite indexes like a breeze. Good ol' times...)

PaulHoule 4y ago

Yep. The cuecat worked by making keystrokes. The trouble with your analysis is I think few people wanted a barcode scanner back then and the ones that did wanted a reliable barcode scanner. A $40 barcode scanner you buy off ebay from a chinese manufacturer is not going to save you any time or hassle by scanning UPC codes although it might do OK with QR codes. A Cuecat was much worse.

banana_giraffe 4y ago

I didn't send the number. It sent a (base64, IIRC) encoded version of the barcode, along with a serial number for tracking purposes. It was fairly quickly reverse engineered, but never quite as simple as some of the contemporary barcode scanners that just entered raw numbers.

morelisp 4y ago
IIRC there was a trivial short to disable the b64 and ID. That and installing a power switch was my first ever real soldering project.
- diggernet 4y ago
  Yeah, exactly. I was puzzled about the talk of Windows-only and hacked software. I soldered on a jumper wire (with a slide switch to easily revert back if needed) and used it as a barcode reader in FreeBSD.

RulerOf 4y ago

>A cuecat was a second keyboard, as far as your computer was concerned. That's how every USB barcode reader I've used worked too. While the approach is certainly very compatible, it left configuration of the device's behavior to be very esoteric. If I wanted to change the key sequence that followed, I had to scan these special programming barcodes[1] to alter its behavior... which is something I never got to work. 1: https://help.eyefinity.com/omew/Barcodes/Programming_Your_Barcode.htm https://help.eyefinity.com/omew/Barcodes/Programming_Your_Ba...

PaulHoule 4y ago
I have one that can be configured to either pretend to be a keyboard or pretend to be a serial device. In terms of reading barcodes though it is absolute rubbish.

squarefoot 4y ago

> when you scanned a normal barcode it just spit it out as if you had typed the number on your keyboard. Many barcode readers work like that, it's called something along "keyboard emulation". Back in the day I wrote a Clipper program for a bookstore whose #1 need was to be able to scan ISBN barcodes of books being bought and sold as quick as possible during that short period before or after summer when they sell new school books editions, and customers wait in long lines outside. The clerk couldn't waste a single second pushing this or that button to tell the software "this comes from the keyboard" or "this from the reader", so I programmed the reader to precede any code being read by a non printable sequence that couldn't have been written on the keyboard but the software would recognize as "what follows must be a barcode". By doing so, adding or removing books to/from the inventory was just a matter of scanning the book code, which would trigger a search function on the database, and pressing the relevant function key (add, remove, sell, order, etc). (This ran on two networked 486s that managed a 90k+ record database with multiple and composite indexes like a breeze. Good ol' times...)