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.
My grandpa had like 3 of these and I never knew what for or why. I guess that explains it!
In 2000, they had the bright idea that people would leave these connected to their computers so that advertisers in magazines could put a barcode on the page to go straight to a webpage with info. Similar to how QR codes function often today.
The problem was that in 2000 almost nobody had an always on internet connection unless you were lucky, wealthy, or in school. And URLs are really easy to type.
They stopped giving them away in 2001.
Don’t forget to edit this otherwise identical comment with the picture link in the other comment
Yeah, I made this one 1st, but realized that there were probably others who would appreciate the info so I made it a top level comment too.