The CueCat is depicted as a pioneering device from the late 1990s that sought to bridge the gap between physical products and the digital world. This analysis dissects the key points made in the video, contextualizes them within technological history, and examines their relevance today.
Indexing of Websites:
Branding and Licensing:
"This was what we thought the future of connecting the physical world, things you had in your hand... to the worldwide web."
The CueCat serves as a fascinating case study in the evolution of technology aimed at connecting the physical world to the Internet. While it faced limitations that QR codes later addressed, its introduction marked a significant moment in the history of consumer technology. The video not only informs viewers about the CueCat but also provokes thought about how far technology has come and the ongoing relevance of these early innovations.
So Dave Matthews the gadget guy here and it's September 18th, 2022. And in September of 1997, my friends and I started thinking about barcodes on all the products of everything from CDs, which were brand new at the time, to books and anything you bought at a store. And we came up with a little gadget that was a reader that plugged into the PS2 port, which was the keyboard port of your computer, called the QCAT. And we're here in the computer history museum in California. And they have a little cute stand for the QCAT scanner, which launched around the year 2000. And they say the QCAT was a personal barcode scanner that linked product UPC, ISBN, and proprietary barcodes to related websites. Radio Shack briefly published parts cataloges, actually all their cataloges with QCAT barcodes for every item. We also had Forbes magazine, Wired magazine, and this is branded Wired because Wired mailed out Qats to all their subscribers and also magazines like Ad Week, Brand Week, Parade Magazine, which was in newspapers. They all had barcodes throughout printed copy. And at the time in the late '9s, websites were only indexed by Yahoo and Google was just coming about then. So if you had like Wired magazine, if you wanted to find out more about a story you were reading, you just swipe that barcode next to the story. We called it a Q and it was an italicized barcode so we could get away from some patents called Limosin which had IP or intellectual property on barcodes on it straight up. But anyway, this was what we thought the future of connecting the physical world, things you had in your hand like a Campbell soup can or Coca-Cola can to the worldwide web. And the reason why we thought that was important is the indexes like Google weren't very well established yet because those were all brand new technologies at the same time. So here we are more than 22 years after inventing this little gadget in Dallas, Texas and the home of Silicon Valley, the home of HP and Google and all Facebook, all these companies. and my little invention, the QCAT, that a team of us in Dallas, Texas built in the late 1990s, still exists on a museum shelf, and you can find them at garage sales and uh on eBay. It's still one of the most sold little gadgets that you can find on the internet today. I'm Dave Matthews. Thanks for watching.
The CueCat began as an idea from 1997 about making physical world objects connect to the Internet. Some would call this the first "Internet of Things" device. Back then every consumer product had a barcode, and a few of the companies who made products would put a basic URL below the barcode. PC's didn't have scanners, so making this device was the perfect solution to giving your PC the ability to "see." More importantly was the face that websites were indexed by Yahoo at the time, as Google was just an early idea of a "page ranking algorithm" in a garage. Yahoo had to have pages submitted which were then organized by category, something that could not be done at scale like Google attempted. Furthermore some brands like Wired Magazine didn't even own the domain Wired.com - it was Hotwired.com back then, and the magazine and web story weren't synchronized. The CueCat was licensed by Wired in order to tie their media properties together. CueCat came decades before QR code popularity which was invented all of the way back in 1994 in Japan and first gained traction in industrial use, especially for tracking automobile parts. Despite that, QR codes remained niche for years. It wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, with the rise of “no-touch” menus and contactless marketing, that QR codes finally went mainstream. Notably, Android added native QR scanning to its camera in 2016, before Apple followed in 2017 with iOS 11. The capacity of QR codes meant that they could be used as "containers" for data versus "pointers" like the CueCat employed. Here's a technical brief below: Linear (1D) barcodes like UPC or Code 128 store data only in one direction horizontally. The CueCat read 39 symbologies of linear codes, inspire of their storage being extremely limited. Typical capacity: • UPC-A: ~12 numeric digits • Code 39: ~25 characters • Code 128: up to ~80 characters in practice QR codes (2D) store data in two dimensions (X and Y), which increases density by orders of magnitude. Maximum theoretical capacity: • Numeric: up to 7,089 characters • Alphanumeric: up to 4,296 characters • Binary: up to 2,953 bytes • Kanji: up to 1,817 characters This means QR codes can embed entire payloads directly: URLs, JSON, contact cards, cryptographic keys, or Japanese text. Key conceptual difference • 1D barcode = pointer (index into a system) • QR code = container (self-describing data object)