The Canon Cat: the little computer that could have changed the world | Hacker News Reader

The Canon Cat: the little computer that could have changed the world

adventofcomputing.libsyn.com

Discussed 2 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33285665

(180 points | 66 days ago | 161 comments)

I remember writing to Jef Raskin and asking if will sell me one of his Canon Cats in the early 2000s. He wanted $10K for one, which I couldn't afford. Didn't realise until much later that he was probably raising funds for his medical treatment, hence the steep price.

Jef also died of Pancreatic Cancer, just like his arch nemesis, Steve Jobs.

That's sad. I really hope that Jef Raskin could afford cancer treatment. Everyone should be able to, but Raskin was an early Apple employee and also made various significant contributions to our field.

Strange that that era tech gurus dies with pancreatic cancer which is a really rare Cancer

TFA is a podcast but I wanted to find images of the product in question. Two links deep I found this PDF which is a multi page advertisement, in case you’re curious what is being discussed!

http://www.canoncat.net/cat/Cat%20Advertisement.pdf

It’s interesting. I knew of the Canon Cat and that it was called that for a number of years.

Seeing that advertisement puts into context a little bit why it might have been called a “Cat”. Note that there’s no mouse and they emphasize this part and the part Jef Raskin had in originating the Macintosh project at Apple.

The "cat" that ate the mouse? If so, a clever reverse dig at Jobs? (it did seem like there was bad blood there)

That’s what I’m thinking, but with the mouse serving as a proxy for the Macintosh. Jobs took over the Macintosh Project after being removed from the Lisa Project and the vision became something else: the thing we’re familiar with. The Canon Cat is closer to what the Macintosh would have been if this hadn’t happened, and Jef Raskin wasn’t the biggest fan of the Mouse either.

I found that too - useful overview for the product vision.

They were really excited about stuff like:

- automatically alphabetize a list - look up and dial a phone number - pull up a calendar - intelligent sleep & continuous save

Fascinating to see these features when they were selling points!

It's surprising that this never caught on with the command line crowd. It's a well thought out approach to doing everything with the keyboard. Did anybody ever use this interface again?

I'm probably one of those people. I first came upon his writings while researching text editors and CLIs. It was all under the umbrella of a design, called "The Humane Interface". I agreed with him about somethings, like the universality of text, and the importance of undo, but disagreed with him about others like "modelessness" and file/program organization.

I can tell you why the Canon Cat never caught on with me. I don't recall ever hearing of it. Maybe I forgot. this was all a long time ago, circa 2000. Overall I did respect the amount of serious thought he had put into text-based interfaces and tried to hang onto what I thought was valuable, but I didn't buy into the system as a whole.

1987 was a difficult year to still introduce single purpose text processing computers:

A year before the slightly more expensive but way more capable Macintosh 512Ke got out, the C64 got it's GEOS graphical environment. In 1986 you could even get an Atari 1040ST with 4 times the RAM for 999$.

And as an addendum: I was typing a lot back in the day, too, but when walking through a department store, these single-purpose computers really looked like a bad deal between all the all-purpose computers that often had a GUI and a drawing app as well.

My thoughts: the command line crowd didn't need it, the rest of the world didn't want it. We were about to get rid of Word Perfect and its obnoxious command keys and nobody was unhappy about it. Why get a fairly expensive dedicated machine that wasn't graphical? It looks like it didn't have games either. Perhaps it could have been a good fit for some office work. I don't think it had much of a chance of changing computing, let alone the world.

It sounds trivial, but people really like eye candy. Anything new has to look appealing, even if only superficially.

In the 80's in an office environment, electric typewriters were still very popular, and increasingly "smart". It actually makes pretty good sense to introduce this sort of interface into that market.

The real problem with the Cat is it appeared just as personal computers and high quality printers were taking off.

Here are two videos that are slightly more direct at explaining what the canon cat is and what it can do:

- https://yewtu.be/jErqdRE5zpQ

- https://yewtu.be/o_TlE_U_X3c

Honestly would love to have leap keys for programming.

You mean just for searching ? If you use IntelliJ, double press Shift key and search away… Tab to change search context.

vi/Vim has a very similar functionality: "/term↵" or "?term↵" searches for the next occurrence of term (forward or backward, respectively).

That's like saying DOS is very similar to the linux commandline.

It's not "very similar", because out of the box search in vi is hot garbage. It's modal, non-incremental (excremental, as Raskin would have it), has very weak feedback and is all engineered around some bogus concept of manually applied line breaks and thus doesn't work properly for the simplest things. For example how do you search for "very similar" in a text file? Well, you basically don't. Instead you search for "very similar"-I-hope-there-is-no-random-non-logical-line-break-between-these-words.

Several decades in, from vim 6 onwards, you can, for a lot of extra mental overhead in terms of config (incsearch, plus more settings to make it less bad), know-how and obscure vim-specific regexp tricks (like \_) sort-of-do it in a really awkward fashion that few would bother with in practice.

By contrast, from what I can tell, the newlines in canon-cat can actually mean something (because it doesn't have the very unix idea of forcing people to manually sprinkle hard line-breaks all over files in order to be usable with the standard tooling) and you can simply search for them by just pressing return whilst depressing leap.

Emacs comes much closer to leap out-of-the-box, but it's still way clunkier.

The one thing that vi(m) out-of-the-box does better than emacs out-of-the-box is integration with actions, but that requires yet more obscure knowledge to work reasonably well (e.g. Ctrl-T, which is poorly supported in many vim emulations).

Well, you seem to know vim a lot better than myself - I only use about 1% of its features to edit config files, and it works well for me, for this purpose.

I agree that vim is one of the best editors available and use both vim and vim keybindings in other editors/IDEs. But that doesn't mean that Canon-cat didn't have some very interesting ideas not present in vim (or pretty much anything else, sadly).

Ah, now I understand - I was only referring to the single feature of positioning the cursor forward/backward to a given sequence of characters, nothing else.

>> the Cat is sometimes called the spiritual successor to the Macintosh

My high school English teacher would have crossed out "is sometimes called" with a red note saying "weasel words".

In what sense is a text-only machine with no mouse the "spiritual successor" to the machine whose main claim to fame was pioneering [edit: or stealing from Xerox] the point and click GUI?

It is all there, the Cat is the spiritual successor to the original Macintosh. Jef wanted the Mac to be cheap and extensible. But Jobs wanted it to be a high end computer for professionals with expensive features. I read into to that that the Cat is the machine that Jef, who originally started the Macintosh project, wanted to build once he learned how what became the Mac was received by its users.

Anyone know whether its terminal "SEND" mode that works with the RS-232C port... supports cursor-addressing?

(And if so, do you happen to know what command set, like VT100?)

Got a laser printer in the advertisement … canon … Japanese Hans font? The basic went with the Daisy Wheel for non-Japanese market ?

What do you mean?

This project periodically intrigues HN readers baited by journalists or bloggers peddling some version of the Raskin was an under-appreciated genius myth.

No harm in pumping out such stories, but it seems lazy to write the same tired story. Isn’t there some other under-appreciated genius with some other failed project that hasn’t been written about a hundred times before?

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