
Canon Cat Resources – Jef Raskin's Forth-Powered Word Processing Appliance - straws
http://www.canoncat.net
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straws
If anyone can help figure out how to trigger the leap keys in the emulator,
I'm all ears:

[https://archive.org/details/canoncat](https://archive.org/details/canoncat)

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It's fascinating to compare a tool like this to the direction the Macintosh
actually took — though Jef Raskin conceived the project in the early days of
Apple, the graphical user interface took its design cues from the research at
Xerox Parc instead. The Humane Interface is Raskin's book on the principles
behind a product like this: focus on spatial context with a zooming UI, be
forgiving with ubiquitous undo, provide one way of doing things, never trap
the user in a mode. A lot of those ideas are embedded in the interfaces we
have today, but they feel entirely orthogonal to the discoverability that a
Parc-style GUI provides.

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vitovito
Left Alt and Right Alt are LEAP left and LEAP right. The MAME source explains
the key combinations up top:
[https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/drivers...](https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/drivers/cat.cpp)

I tested them in Chrome on a MacBook Pro and they seem to work, but your
mileage based on browser/OS/keyboard may vary.

~~~
straws
It works!!! Thank you for creating this resource. I'm on the hunt for research
around this topic, especially on the various manifestations of Oberon.

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SwellJoe
I love weird old computing dead ends like this. Pretty good ideas at the wrong
time and place in history to allow them to take off. I mean, no mouse in 1987?
Task-focused rather than general purpose? I remember reading about them when
they were new; Amiga was my obsession by then (though I couldn't afford one
for another couple years), but I devoured all the computing media I could get
my hands on. They seemed like a toy, to me, and a very expensive one, to boot.

It's cool to imagine what the world would have looked like had we gone down
different paths. If this had come a year or two earlier, been a few hundred
dollars cheaper, maybe we'd be using a very different sort of computer today.
But, probably not. The GUI/mouse interface has been an unbeatable monster for
decades now. The windowing GUI may have just been delayed by a year or two.
Nerds (myself included) kinda pine for the pre-mouse days now and then, but
even so, I don't know a lot of people who use an exclusively text-based UI. I
like a tiled window manager and a text editor that's most controllable via
keyboard, but I also like having a mouse.

~~~
tyingq
I didn't use this one, but the somewhat similar Wang dedicated word processors
were pretty nice to work with, and pretty successful until PCs and (mostly)
Wordstar wiped them out. Wordstar, no mouse needed, thrived for quite a while
as well.

~~~
Joeri
George R.R. Martin still uses wordstar to write his books.

~~~
nullc
I'm sure at least a few people here use joe -- with its wordstar like control
commands-- as their editor of choice today.

~~~
digi_owl
Dug joe back up recently after not having touched it in ages. And the first
thing that caught me off guard is that unlike most exit prompts, answering Y
throws changes away...

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RodgerTheGreat
For those whose interest was piqued by the mention of Forth, it appears the
PDF link to the tForth documentation on this page is wrong; the correct link
is here:

[http://www.canoncat.net/cat/Cat%20tForth%20Documentation.pdf](http://www.canoncat.net/cat/Cat%20tForth%20Documentation.pdf)

~~~
vitovito
That link should be fixed now. Thanks.

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jnaina
I wrote to Jef in the late 90's to ask if he had one of the Cat's available
for sale, to add to my MAC and Lisa collection. He quoted 10K for one, which I
thought was too steep. Later learned that he had health problems and was
looking to raise funds for his medical treatments. Another visionary from
Apple who later succumbed to Cancer.

~~~
vivreviva
Pancreatic to be exact. He didn't actually know he was sick in the 90s.
However, he was trying to send his children to college. Jef never saw any
money from the Mac.

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Stratoscope
I hope I'm not out of line posting this here, but if any collectors near the
SF Peninsula are looking for a Cat, I have one that could use a better home.
It's in good working condition with manuals and floppy disks and the
daisywheel printer. My email is in my profile if interested.

~~~
RachelF
You should contact the Computer History Museum in Palo Alto, they might want
it, and then everyone can see it.

[http://www.computerhistory.org/](http://www.computerhistory.org/)

~~~
Top19
I've been there twice and never seen anything like the Cat there. Also if it
works and turns on, you can also try the "Living Computer Museum" in Seattle,
sponsored by Paul Allen. I don't know their policy, maybe they will even buy
it if it works.

~~~
vivreviva
Have you been to digibarn? It is really fantastic. It is run by Bruce Damer

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burntrelish1273
ZOMG, I've been looking for what was the name of this device for some time. We
had these in a typing class in middle school, c. 1991. There was a way to get
a Forth interpreter booted on it.

~~~
digi_owl
[http://www.canoncat.net/cat/Cat%20Forth%20Inside.txt](http://www.canoncat.net/cat/Cat%20Forth%20Inside.txt)

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CuriousSkeptic
Also checkout his book The Humane Interface (
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface)
) he writes a little about this system there while describing the ideal
interface in his mind.

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digi_owl
Reading about its embedded Forth makes me ponder how it would be to boot
directly into Emacs.

