I had a couple including one USB one that I later modified to use to scan regular bar codes.
I pulled up Wikipedia to look up who created them, and apparently he changed his name after they failed. He was also on Curse of Oak Island searching for gold and was involved in ballot shenanigans in the 2020 US presidential election where he was notable for supposedly inventing a machine to find bamboo fibers on ballots.
what is it?
Went and looked it up. Apparently they’re barcode readers. Kind of cute shape! Radioshack is apparently an electronics store found in the USA. Yanks think everyone lives in the US.
I wonder if these predated usb connectors? If it does, they must have had a hell of a time getting them to connect to non-universal ports on the various machines people owned.
It was US based, but there were stores in United States, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. It was owned by Tandy Corporation who made early home computers starting in the late 1970’s and home electronics gear. (They originally started as a leather and craft supplier though)
USB was common by then. You still had to specifically install drivers for each peripheral, though.
You can see the USB-A connector in the picture. The USB standard was established a few years before this, and a lot of peripherals started using it right away, unlike the micro-USB connector, which should have died years ago.
The original ones had a PS/2 port, where you would just insert it in between your keyboard and the computer, and when it scanned it effectively just was entering the keys as though they had been typed out on the keyboard itself. The very end days for this product they introduced a USB version but it’s by far the less common.
It used to be an electronics store, now its just a bankrupt cell phone store.
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