When I think of the late 90s, I think of the :CueCat and smile. The :CueCat embodies everything I remember about the late 90s, from its dazzling insistence that new technology was the greatest no matter what, to its worst Dot Com spending excesses.
The first thing you might notice about the :CueCat is the spelling of its name. The non-traditional punctuation (starting the name with a colon) and the use of interCaps (a.k.a. CamelCase) are both so "late 90s" (the :CueCat first hit the market in 1998) it makes my teeth ache.
The :CueCat was basically a hand-held bar code scanner. Not terribly exciting, you might think. Well, unfortunately you would be right. Even making it shaped like a kitty can't rouse consumer interest in a hand-held bar code scanner.
One of the main reasons for the public's massively unenthusiastic response to the :CueCat was, what are you supposed to scan? You had to hack it if you wanted to scan your own bar codes. Heaven forbid. No, the :CueCat's entire purpose was to let you see more ads, or read more about the ad you just saw.
Oh goody!
You could additionally use it to scan a code in an ad, and have it take you to that ad's website. Which is frankly even more trouble than just typing in the URL, if you ask me. But it was supposed to be new and exciting, and they spent millions on the thing.
Many of them were given away free to Radio Shack customers. Others were shipped to technology fiends with an edition of Wired Magazine. In both cases, :CueCat was reaching out to people who were already technologically savvy, and would probably A) be fine with typing in their own URLs and B) be resistant to using a bar code scanner which was shaped like an adorable kitty cat.
Worse, Digital Convergence Technologies (the makers of the :CueCat) targeted the techies as the early adopters of the :CueCat, and then proceeded to A) embed a bar code within the :CueCat so that theoretically each :CueCat user's actions could be tracked in a massive central database, and B) get ticked off at the very idea that users might crack their :CueCats and use them as they wished. Thus stifling and pissing off the very people they had been hoping to woo.
These days you can use your :CueCat to scan your books into LibraryThing, if you so desire. The :CueCat website has been dead since 2004, and the :CueCat itself is but a relic of history.