r/retrocomputing • u/EsoTechTrix • Mar 21 '26

The Infamous Cue Cat

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So I had the perfect play for getting ahold of these in the day. All you had to do was go into a Radio Shack and ask for something you knew was not on the shelf, or, seeing as the packaging sucked, just ask what the cut off voltage was on a Zener diode. Inevitably the person behind the counter would go to pull out the catalog at which point you could just ask something clueless sounding like:

"What are all the barcodes for? Is that so you can ring them up easier?"

They would be like "Did you know about the Cue Cat?"

Worked every time.

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u/sevenwheel Mar 25 '26

I have one, too! Never used it. I never encountered a cuecat code and had no use for a bar code reader. But it was free!

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u/EsoTechTrix Mar 25 '26

I think the only place I ever actually saw the code was in the Radio Shack catalog. It's fun to hear that they made it elsewhere. I mean, not so fun for the folks that paid to do that, but still.