Canon Cat Resources – Jef Raskin's Forth-Powered Word Processing Appliance (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

If anyone can help figure out how to trigger the leap keys in the emulator, I'm all ears:

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.

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.

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

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.

Also checkout his book 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.

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