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My Weird Prompts · August 25 · 22 min

The CueCat: A Dot-Com Catastrophe

In the year 2000, RadioShack gave away millions of free cat-shaped barcode scanners called the CueCat. It promised to make magazines clickable, raised $185 million, and crashed spectacularly. This episode covers the ambitious vision, the fatal lock-in, the security flaws, and how the open-source community turned the plastic cat into a universal scanner. Episode #403927 — open it directly at myweirdprompts.com/403927

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In the year 2000, RadioShack gave away millions of free cat-shaped barcode scanners called the CueCat. It promised to make magazines clickable, raised $185 million, and crashed spectacularly. This episode covers the ambitious vision, the fatal lock-in, the security flaws, and how the open-source community turned the plastic cat into a universal scanner.

Episode #403927 — open it directly at myweirdprompts.com/403927

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