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I had a couple including one USB one that I later modified to use to scan regular bar codes.
I pulled up Wikipedia to look up who created them, and apparently he changed his name after they failed. He was also on Curse of Oak Island searching for gold and was involved in ballot shenanigans in the 2020 US presidential election where he was notable for supposedly inventing a machine to find bamboo fibers on ballots.
I had one of these. Bought it on eBay for a fiver to build a ryo 2-factor login on my computer that basically consisted of appending my password w a random value that I then printed as a barcode so that logging in meant typing in my password, then scanning the barcode w the cuecat, then hitting enter.
Hmm, that's kinda clever. What year was it in?
hell if i know, late enough that they were considered "abandoned" tech by then and you could get them cheap but before i graduated college because this was something I did in the dorms. I had the ps/2 passthrough version rather than the USB native, but I think their manufacturing window was narrow enough that that wouldn't help pin down a time.