this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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I had one of these. I used a little driver program to use it to read regular bar codes via the stockroom computer at work. It was kind of a pain in the ass because you had to swipe it across the bar code at a steady speed and you couldn't just point-and-beep. But it worked fine for our back room computer where this annoyance was outweighed by having to carry whatever it was all the way up front to one of the point of sale terminals to scan it.
This being an era when real bar code scanners cost Serious Money, and the now ubiquitous smartphone based mobile terminal did not yet exist. Yes, there were Windows CE commercial handhelds with bar code scanners built in, but those were monstrously expensive; management wasn't going to spring for one of those, either.
Radio Shack gave these away for free but by the time I was using it they were wise to the unapproved use of the things, and they wouldn't give you more than one.
I had one of these too and it never worked right. That may have been because I was a teenager at the time and had very little patience for such things lol