> 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 somet

> 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...)