Digital Convergence Corporation is hardly a household name, and there’s a good reason for that. However, it raised about $185 million in investments around the year 2000 from companies such as Coca-Cola, Radio Shack, GE, E. W. Scripps, and the media giant Belo Corporation. So what did all these companies want, and why didn’t it catch on? If you are old enough, you might remember the :CueCat, but you probably thought it was Radio Shack’s disaster. They were simply investors.

The Big Idea

The :CueCat was a barcode scanner that, usually, plugged into a PC’s keyboard port (in those days, that was normally a PS/2 port). A special cable, often called a wedge, was like a Y-cable, allowing you to use your keyboard and the scanner on the same port. The scanner looked like a cat, of course.

However, the :CueCat was not just a generic barcode scanner. It was made to only scan “cues” which were to appear in catalogs, newspapers, and other publications. The idea was that you’d see something in an ad or a catalog, rush to your computer to scan the barcode, and be transported to the retailer’s website to learn more and complete the purchase.

The software could also listen using your sound card for special audio codes that would play on radio or TV commercials and then automatically pop up the associated webpage. So, a piece of software that was reading your keyboard, listening to your room audio at all times, and could inject keystrokes into your computer. What could go wrong?

Of Interest

You might think this was some tiny startup that died with a whimper, but Radio Shack, Forbes, Wired, and several major newspapers were onboard. The :CueCat cost about $6.50 to produce, but most people never bought one. Radio Shack, Forbes, and Wired were giving them away.

The problem is, even free was too high a price for most people. To use the device, you had to register and complete a long survey full of invasive questions. Then the software showed you an ad bar. Digital Convergence had your demographic info, your surfing habits, and knew what you were scanning.

Even then, the scanner solved a non-problem. If you saw something in a Radio Shack catalog, for example, it was probably not so hard to go to their website and search for it by title or stock number. Especially if you were sitting in front of your computer. If you weren’t… well, then, the :CueCat didn’t help you in that case, anyway.

The Next Big Thing?

It is easy to look back on this and think, “What a bad idea?” But Digital Convergence and its investors were in a full-blown media blitz. The video below shows a contemporary demo of the technology.

If you still aren’t sold, look at how happy the woman in the Radio Shack commercial is that she didn’t have to manually search the web for her next phone purchase.

A clip from the Radio Shack 2002 catalog (from RadioShackCatalogs.com)

Problem solved, right? Want to buy that new ham radio? Scan the code, and you don’t have to type “Alinco” into a search box! Even the table of contents in the 2002 RadioShack catalog was festooned with barcodes.

The RadioShack catalog might have been an exception, though. A 2001 issue of Forbes magazine showed sparing use of the barcodes and no obvious ones linking to big advertisers. You would think the advertisers would have been a prime target, even if you had to make deals to get them onboard.

Hackers

Naturally, hacks immediately appeared. Drives from [Pierre-Philippe Coupard] and [Michael Rothwell] allowed you to use the :CueCat without the invasive software or registration. You could even scan normal barcodes like UPC codes. Radio Shack and others wound up simply giving away $6.50 barcode scanners.

While people were already prickly about the amount of information gathered and the tracking, hackers found a report file on a public server that revealed personal info about 140,000 users — a huge number for the year 2000.

With hackers attacking both the hardware and the company’s website, Digital Convergence had to act. They changed their license, claiming that you didn’t own the scanner and forbidding reverse engineering. There were no real lawsuits, but there were threats and, as you might imagine, that just made things worse.

The Decline

By 2001, there were a very few USB-native :CueCats distributed. But the bad publicity and the lack of usefulness took its toll. By mid-year, most of the 225 employees at Digital Convergence had been let go. Later in the year, the investors decided to stop using the tech entirely.

By 2005, you could buy the now-surplus devices for $0.30 each, as long as you agreed to take 500,000 or more of them. You can still find them on the used market if you look. Open source software is still around that can make them do useful things, but honestly, unless you’re hacking it into a custom hardware setup, your phone is a better barcode scanner.

Hardware

You can still find some of the contemporary teardowns of the :CueCat online. There were, apparently, several revisions of the hardware, but at least one version had a cheap CPU, a serial EEPROM, an 8 KB static RAM, and a handful of small parts. For a free device, the insides looked pretty good.

:CueCat without cover by [Shaddack]

Removing the ID from the device was as easy as removing the EEPROM, although people were less equipped to remove SMD chips in those days. You could also just lift a single pin, which was slightly easier. At least one enterprising hacker added a DIP switch to experiment with the pin settings.

Aftermath

Of course, now we have QR codes. But these are somewhat more private, work with the ubiquitous cell phone, and even then haven’t caught on in the way Digital Convergence had planned.

Was it a good idea? That’s debatable. But giant privacy grabs usually go poorly. Granted, in 2000, that might not have been as obvious as it is today. But it still doesn’t keep companies from finding it out all over again.

via https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/picture.html :

An amusing photo

Here's a publicity photo from about 1972, showing Ken and me in front of a PDP-11.

From the right, the major items of equipment are

• At the far right, on the table, are what someone discerned was a VT01A storage-tube display (based on Tek 611) and a small keyboard for it. Slightly hard to make out.
• A main CPU cabinet, partly behind the table. The processor is a PDP-11/20; it must have been our second one, with the Digital Special Systems KS-11 memory management unit. Our very first just said "PDP11," not "11/20." The arrays of distorted rectangles above it and in other cabinets are the labels on DECtape canisters.
• Another cabinet. Careful examination of the image by Steve Westin detects the top of the bezel of an 11/45 CPU barely peeking above the TTY to the right of the one Ken is typing at. A paper tape reader is above it.
• The third cabinet sports a dual DECtape drive at the top.
• A cabinet with another DECtape drive, probably also containing BA-11 extension boxes within.
• A cabinet with RK03 disk drives. These were made by Diablo (subsumed by Xerox) and OEMed to Digital. Digital later began manufacturing their own version (RK05).
• A cabinet containing RF11/RS11 controller and fixed-head disks. By this time / and swap space lived there, while /usr was on the RK03s.
• On top of the machine are what look like magtapes. A probable TU10 transport is barely visible just below Ken's chin, at least if you have the monitor brightness and contrast adjusted favorably.

In front, we have

• Ken (sitting) and me (standing), both with more luxuriant and darker hair than we have now.
• Scientific American March 1999 p. 48 should have checked the IDs; we're interchanged in its caption of this same picture.
• Two Teletype 33 terminals

If you want a giant (2.1 MB) JPEG version at higher resolution, click here.

More pictures of PDP-11 equipment are available in John Holden's collection.

Note that while CP/M-86 for the IBM Personal Computer Version 1.0 says Copyright 1982 on it, CP/M-86 was already shipping for other machines prior to then, as documented by the article CP/M-86 Captures Leading Share in 16-Bit World Market in a 1981 issue of Digital Research News:

IBM recently announced its 16-bit personal computer, which will use CP/M-86 as its alternate operating system. With this long-awaited move, IBM joins Piiceon, Artelonics and Sirius Systems, which have all introduced 16-bit computers with CP/M-86 in the last six months.

Can CP/M-86 achieve the same widespread acceptance in the 16-bit world as CP/M has in the 8-bit world? More than 400 different computer manufacturers use CP/M, prompting Business Week to hail it as the de-facto standard of 8-bit operating systems. As yet, only a few computer manufacturers use CP/M-86. But behind the raw number is a more revealing statistic. "There are only a few hundred 16-bit machines on the market today," said John Katsaros, director of marketing. "We estimate that about 25 percent of the 16-bit installations use CP/M-86. That makes it the most widely used 16-bit microcomputer operating system."

Other browser-based CP/M emulation includes:

• 8-bit 64K CP/M Version 2.2 (on a Z80)
• Eagle Computer's OEM version of CP/M-86 Ver 1.1B (1983)

If you follow electronics history, few names were as ubiquitous as RCA, the Radio Corporation of America. Yet in modern times, the company is virtually forgotten for making large computers. [Computer History Archive Project] has a rare film from the 1970s (embedded below) explaining how RCA planned to become the number two supplier of business computers, presumably behind behemoth IBM. They had produced other large computers in the 1950s and 1960s, like the BIZMAC, the RCA 510, and the Spectra. But these new machines were their bid to eat away at IBM’s dominance in the field.

RCA had innovative ideas and arguably one of the first demand paging, virtual memory operating systems for mainframes. You can hope they were better at designing computers than they were at making commercials.

The HTPC or Home Theater Personal Computer was an idea before its time. Something only well-heeled and tech-savvy tinkering media geeks could even achieve, and then, more often than not, the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. Yet, we have the HTPC to thank for our myriad modern media options. So let's look back at the HTPC and give it the respect it deserves.

The HTPC was ahead of its time

At its core, an HTPC is the combination of a PC and a TV, or at least some sort of AV (Audio-Visual) technology. This goes back further than you might think. The Amiga's Video Toaster—an expansion card with multiple video source inputs—is responsible for much of the titling and special effects we saw on TV in the 90s.

By the late 90s, video capture cards were commonplace and relatively easy to get for your computer. In the early 2000s, I had a used Pentium II computer equipped with an ATI All-in-Wonder, which combined a 3D accelerator with a capture card, so that you could record TV, digitize VHS tapes, and then watch it on your computer or play it back on a real TV.

[Codeolences] tells us about the FORBIDDEN Soviet Computer That Defied Binary Logic. The Setun, the world’s first ternary computer, was developed at Moscow State University in 1958. Its troubled and short-lived history is covered in the video. The machine itself uses “trits” (ternary digits) instead of “bits” (binary digits).

When your digits have three discrete values there are a multiplicity of ways of assigning meaning to each state, and the Setun uses a system known as balanced ternary where each digit can be either -1, 0, or 1 and otherwise uses a place-value system in the normal way.

An interesting factoid that comes up in the video is that base-3 (also known as radix-3) is the maximally efficient way to represent numbers because three is the closest integer to the natural growth constant, the base of the natural logarithm, e, which is approximately 2.718 ≈ 3.

Using computers that feature a high-resolution, full-color graphical interface is commonplace today, but it took a lot of effort and ingenuity to get to this point. This long history is the topic of [Dr. Jon Peddie]’s article series called The Graphics Chip Chronicles. In the first of eight volumes, the early days of the NEC µPD7220 and the burgeoning IBM PC.

https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_9309_September_1993

after reading Macworld's review of Apple's first PDA, be sure to read Guy Kawasaki's dissenting view near the back of the magazine (page 366 in the archive.org reader):

Late one evening, UCLA graduate student Charley Kline sat in front of a refrigerator-sized computer and sent the message "lo" to a rack of computers operated by systems engineer Bill Duvall at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), hundreds of miles away.

The computer, which weighs 2.5 metric tons (2.8 short tons), was built and used at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, Berkshire. Construction started in 1949, and the machine became operational in April 1951. It was handed over to the computing group in May 1952 and remained in use until 1957.

It used 828 dekatrons for volatile memory, similar to RAM in a modern computer, and paper tape for input and program storage. A total of 480 relays were used for sequence control and 199 valves (electronic vacuum tube) for calculations. The computer stands 2 meters high, 6 meters wide, and 1 meter deep with a power consumption of 1.5 kW. Output was to either a Creed teleprinter or to a paper tape punch. The machine was decimal and initially had twenty eight-digit dekatron registers for internal storage, which was increased to 40 which appeared to be enough for nearly all calculations. It was assembled from components more commonly found in a British telephone exchange.

This talk is a polemic that distills the pessimistic side of my feelings about systems research these days. I won’t talk much about the optimistic side, since lots of others can do that for me; everyone’s excited about the computer industry. I may therefore present a picture somewhat darker than reality. However, I think the situation is genuinely bad and requires action.

• See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike for context