I am now in possession of something fairly strange, one of those CueCat things from the early 2000's (specifically Y2K itself), and I've been messing around with it for a bit. I got it at a semi-local goodwill for US$2.97, and it works just fine. I've got software, courtesy of opportunistic people that lived in the great ancient times of 2000, that basically undoes the encryption the CueCat uses, turning a garbled mess into something decipherable. I've attached some images of it functioning and reading out random stuff from my collection, and spitting out the data of those scans in Notepad. I have the PS/2 version, which is lucky, because I only have two USB ports on this motherboard.

I find this particular piece of hardware interesting, because of the fact that it can scan normal bar-codes. From what I can gather, it was meant to scan specific bar-codes in things like magazines, where you could scan a product from the magazine, and using the magic of data over your phone lines, could buy that product without you having to visit the website or do anything, granted that you had all of your information entered beforehand. It was meant to make money by getting data about a specific user through a chip that contained a serial number on it, or something to that effect, and would give companies information about what you bought, so they could advertise similar products to you, or something to that effect. People just ended up taking these things and writing software to let them scan whatever the hell they wanted, and because it was given out free, they essentially got a free bar-code scanner- precisely what I've done here, except I paid $3.00 for it instead of getting it for free.