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The Canon Cat

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Re: The Canon Cat

#11

Post by Theodores »

This wasn't an isolated incident of innovation from Canon. Can anyone remember their 486 laptop with built in printer/scanner?

The 'note jet' had the same form factor as a normal notebook of the era. The printing part was roughly where you would expect the function keys to be, under the hood there was a miniature inkjet cartridge that could be swapped out for a scanning cartridge. The paper line was pretty good, going under the keyboard. I can't remember there being a paper tray.

In those days 'executives' struggled to plug a printer in so it solved the 'check connections' problems they faced. It also looked very cool, distinctly 'from the future'. Actually the idea was from the past - this was a take on the standalone electronic typewriter. I always felt the idea needed to live on, not least for travelling salesmen that need some sales order printed out and signed whilst at a customer's site.

They dropped the model when the Pentium came along for the idea never to be seen again.

Re: The Canon Cat

#12

Post by huxley »

Theodores wrote: post #11

This wasn't an isolated incident of innovation from Canon. Can anyone remember their 486 laptop with built in printer/scanner? The 'note jet' had the same form factor as a normal notebook of the era. The printing part was roughly where you would expect the function keys to be, under the hood there was a miniature inkjet cartridge that could be swapped out for a scanning cartridge. The paper line was pretty good, goin…

You can relive the memories by reading the 1993 NY Times review:

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/18/business/the-executive-com...

Re: The Canon Cat

#13

Post by mikecane »

I had a Canon CAT. The praise for it is overrated. It was never as simple as people claim nor really any joy to use. The hardware itself also tended to die suddenly. When mine died I went to repair place where I happened upon the Canon rep. He said the CAT's motherboard was prone to suddenly dying and the only solution was to buy a new CAT.

Re: The Canon Cat

#14

Post by mmastrac »

avdempsey wrote: post #4

My uncle was one of the programmers on the Cat project, he still has a working production unit. The Cat is a handsome little machine. There's something elegant about its lack of silos: all of your (textual) data is in one space that you leap around with the aid of dedicated search forwards/backwards keys, reprogramming or extending the system itself is likewise a keystroke away. It obviously wasn't a commercial succe…

He should dump the ROM off that thing to preserve it.

Re: The Canon Cat

#15

Post by simbolit »

sanoli wrote: post #10

I've always been a fan of the way the Cat works. So much so that my main work tool is pretty much a copy of the Cat on modern hardware. It beats, and has been beating for a bunch of years now, any alternative that I try to give a go. PS. Notational Velocity and NValt are pretty awesome too.

can you elaborate? what is your main work tool?

Re: The Canon Cat

#16

Post by fit2rule »

tqs wrote: post #3

From one perspective, Jobs and Raskin ended up going down two opposite paths. Raskin emphasized that "modes" were a major cause of UI problems. Essentially you want a UI that the user can habituate to as strongly as possible, so that all one's attention can be focused on the actual task and all of the administrivia you need to do tell the computer your intention are handled subconsciously. Like touch typing at a high…

>>>Did Apple end up this way because Apps are a more natural fit for a consumerist model? "Want to do this task with your machine? Don't bother figuring out how you can do it yourself. There's an App for that!" No Modes vs Buy More Modes?

Bingo! Evidence that this is the case: not many computers ship with compilers onboard any more. OS vendors want you to continue to invest in their platform - Apps just happen to be a way to do that. There is a vested interest in making developer tools as weighty and difficult (for the PITS) as possible .. why learn programming when you can just buy an app? In many ways, we've gone completely backwards in the computer industry - users have to spend a lot more time and effort to maintain their platforms than they should have to.. same is true of developers, as well. The fuss and nonsense required to just get a window up on the screen being one case in point. We're all scrambling to learn these new - but not necessarily better - technologies, because the OS vendors have a vested interest in capturing the minds of their users.

Re: The Canon Cat

#17

Post by fit2rule »

simbolit wrote: post #15
sanoli wrote: post #10

I've always been a fan of the way the Cat works. So much so that my main work tool is pretty much a copy of the Cat on modern hardware. It beats, and has been beating for a bunch of years now, any alternative that I try to give a go. PS. Notational Velocity and NValt are pretty awesome too.

can you elaborate? what is your main work tool?

The mischief in me wants to say that its probably emacs or something .. ;)

Re: The Canon Cat

#18

Post by jvilk »

And now you can relive this classic computer in your browser, courtesy of JSMESS [1] (although, at the moment, it doesn't run at 100% speed).

Information on key bindings and how you can e.g. activate the FORTH interpreter can be found here [2], although I couldn't get the FORTH interpreter working (I'm not sure if the browser/Emscripten can properly distinguish between ALT keys).

[1] http://jsmess.textfiles.com/messloader.html?module=cat

[2] http://mamedev.org/source/src/mess/drivers/cat.c.html

Re: The Canon Cat

#19

Post by matthewmacleod »

fit2rule wrote: post #16
tqs wrote: post #3

From one perspective, Jobs and Raskin ended up going down two opposite paths. Raskin emphasized that "modes" were a major cause of UI problems. Essentially you want a UI that the user can habituate to as strongly as possible, so that all one's attention can be focused on the actual task and all of the administrivia you need to do tell the computer your intention are handled subconsciously. Like touch typing at a high…

>>>Did Apple end up this way because Apps are a more natural fit for a consumerist model? "Want to do this task with your machine? Don't bother figuring out how you can do it yourself. There's an App for that!" No Modes vs Buy More Modes? Bingo! Evidence that this is the case: not many computers ship with compilers onboard any more. OS vendors want you to continue to invest in their platform - Apps just happen to be…

There is a vested interest in making developer tools as weighty and difficult (for the PITS) as possible .. why learn programming when you can just buy an app?

This is nonsense. You appear to be arguing that every computer user should be able to develop software - equivalent to arguing that every driver should be able to build a car.

You know why modern computers don't ship with development tools? Because they are no longer used exclusively by people who are computer programmers. They're mass-market devices now, and one of the requirements of that is that they need to allow users to perform tasks without learning how to develop software - an act that is totally orthogonal to actually performing those tasks.

Coupled with this, those people who are developers and require access to development tools have immediate access to them, thanks to the Internet. You can immediately download SDKs and IDEs for both Windows and MacOS, and every major Linux distribution comes bundled with a compiler. Same for Android, iPhones, etc. - it would be nothing but a waste to provide development tools when the vast majority of users do not require them, and when they are so easily available elsewhere.

I'm also completely unclear what "fuss and nonsense required to just get a window up on the screen" you think exists, given the ~10 lines of code which is required to do this on any platform.

Re: The Canon Cat

#20

Post by fit2rule »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #19
fit2rule wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>>Did Apple end up this way because Apps are a more natural fit for a consumerist model? "Want to do this task with your machine? Don't bother figuring out how you can do it yourself. There's an App for that!" No Modes vs Buy More Modes? Bingo! Evidence that this is the case: not many computers ship with compilers onboard any more. OS vendors want you to continue to invest in their platform - Apps just happen to be…

There is a vested interest in making developer tools as weighty and difficult (for the PITS) as possible .. why learn programming when you can just buy an app? This is nonsense. You appear to be arguing that every computer user should be able to develop software - equivalent to arguing that every driver should be able to build a car. You know why modern computers don't ship with development tools? Because they are no…

Its not nonsense - it used to be that you could write a new application for your computer if you wanted to, easily enough, and you'd have the exact same tools as anyone else would have - because the computer shipped with them.

The 'developers' arose as a class of society simply because computer use became decoupled from application development.

>>10 lines of code to make a window

But this doesn't actually do something. Used to be, you could write a functional application with 10 lines of code -but now, because computing is being run by Fashion Directors (I agree with you on this, btw) where 'trends' are more important than actual use, we get a lot of weight added to the truss normally bearing the load of 'usefulness' to the user.

I don't consider that we've actually made a lot of progress with human computer interaction over the decades since the Canon Cat was around. In many ways, I think we've been side-tracked in the computer industry. The rise of Windows, for example, set the whole computer industry back 10 years ..

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