I’m at the Wired 30th anniversary event as I type this and they didn’t have one at their Gadget Lab installation. I didn’t have one with me, sadly.

We were a sign of the future of the web and where we sit today with smartphones and what is capable today. It’s a time capsule.

You’re my people. Well done! We created Make Magazine and Maker Faire to celebrate this good behavior!

It was the razor blade model. It cost us under $10 per unit to make and we charged licenses for content creators to make their physical world items tie into digital content to interact with the brand new web world of 2000. One may also call this a chicken or the egg problem. Y2K was amazing.

The business model was to literally give them away. Whether humans wanted them or not, that’s another story. Thank you for your input.

It was a ROT encoder. Google that. So software “decode” vs hardware “hack.”

Ooooh that’s right. I’d forgotten that.

My mom is proud of you. She hangs them on her Christmas tree. #inventor’smoms

What a sweet idea. I could see a lot of my (essentially) e-waste becoming ornaments, though not many devices are as conventionally "beautiful" as the CueCat.

Bought wasn’t correct in that context as they were always free to the community and consumer. I agree with hare brained whole heartedly.

I admit my memory on the subject is imperfect. :-)

80% PS2. Rest were USB. A brand new technology.

Pretty impressive to fit USB onto such a necessarily low-cost product at the time.

Considering Windows 95 didn’t have drivers sorted yet, especially true! Mainly we did it for Macintosh support.

One founder was a little off to say the least.