4 ms·

They gave it away for free?

• ok123456 2y ago
  Then, they tried to use the DMCA to stop people from writing open-source drivers that would have enabled it to be a generic barcode reader. There were a lot of heated words on Slashdot about this back then. Now, people would just accept that.
• whartung 2y ago
  They MAILED THEM TO YOU. Like AOL CDs. They just showed up one day.
  • kstrauser 2y ago
    I think mine came bundled with an issue of Wired.
    • kstrauser 2y ago
      No, really. Some magazine I subscribed to at the time, and I thought it was Wired, sent me one wrapped in with an issue. It was some big promo they were doing. Edit: Yep. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat > Wired magazine mailed over 500,000 of the free devices as gifts to their subscribers.
• ssl-3 2y ago
  Reports varied pretty broadly, but yes: They were generally "free." (The whole game was meant to drive customer interaction, and making the game pay-to-play would've been even stupider.) At the Radio Shack that I frequented, they weren't quite free: I had to take a paper catalog along with the barcode reader -- even though I already had a copy of that same catalog on my coffee table at home that they'd sent in the mail. I wound up with a couple of them that I never did much with. (I had some grand ideas of using them for automated shopping lists for pantry items that worked fine in my head...until I realized that the concept required very good compliance from the entire household or it became pretty useless. I didn't want to start that war so the concept went nowhere.)