10 ms·

The Canon Cat: The Writing Information Appliance (2004)

101 points by jka 5y ago

pimlottc 5y ago
I'm struggling to understand what was different about this device. All I've managed to gather so far is that there two cursors and two special "leap keys" on the keyboard. Anyone got a more informative summary?
- glxxyz 5y ago
  I posted it above but this video helps, skip the very slow demonstrations of cursor keys & mouse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c
- gjvc 5y ago
  that website is a bit anaemic -- google for canon cat for more content and form an opinion based on that
- retrocryptid 5y ago
  it boots to the same state it was in just before you shut it off. modern macs kind of do this, but most of the time the apps aren't quite the same.
- timmaxw 5y ago
  I found this page helpful: http://www.canoncat.org/canoncat/onlinehelp.html http://www.canoncat.org/canoncat/onlinehelp.html
jll29 5y ago
The UK also had a word processing applicatiom, the Amstrad PCW8256: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlsODXKOYX8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlsODXKOYX8 I would like to see a modern incarnation with e-Paper, an SSD and an editor with focus mode, presumably you could run around for a week without charging.
- zelos 5y ago
  Locoscript was a great piece of software. I remember switching from that to an early version of Word and being incredulous that in Word the entire line of text you were typing would flicker as you typed because it couldn't redraw the screen fast enough.
  - Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
    And LocoScript wasn't even the fastest word-processing software on the PCW. (Protext was.) The PCW was such a well-conceived product. People were still using them as their main computer well into the '00s. I wrote some mapping software for it which LocoScript Software distributed - it did a creditable job of both display and routing despite having nothing more powerful than a 4MHz Z80.
    - lproven 5y ago
      FWIW, Protext for the PC (and Amiga, ST, & presumably 8-bit platforms too) is now legal freeware. https://web.archive.org/web/20140825104412/http://www.tigerteam.co.uk/protext/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140825104412/http://www.tigert...
- lproven 5y ago
  The PCW wasn't an app. It was a computer, able to run CP/M and thousands of apps. It also had a very conventional late-1980s UI. I love PCWs -- I still own 2 -- but comparing PCWs to the Canon Cat is a bit like saying that an Airbus A380 is a car, because it has wheels and an engine.
Apocryphon 5y ago
What would be the modern version of such a word processor?
- TuringTest 5y ago
  Second-generation outliners and data-heavy notetaking apps (Notion, Obsidian, logseq, Airtable, Roam Research...) provide similar functionality as a unified environment for all your information needs stored on a single device with a homogeneous interface. Though I'd say they have huge shortcomings in terms of usability with respect to using them solely from keyboard shortcuts, at least compared to the simple efficient model of the Canon Cat and its radically modeless interactions.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modeless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modeless
georgia_peach 5y ago
A word/excel appliance with a vim-clutch that gets in the way of the spacebar. I believe the market chose wisely in this particular case.
kwatsonafter 5y ago
Such an underrated computer. I think, "The Humane Interface" needs to be standard reading for anyone that designs computers or consumer electronics and ZUIs were such a good idea-- I wish there was a way to, "ZUIify" my Mac desktop so I could just have a massive, "nexus" of, "zoomimable" desktop spaces. I still don't understand why, "universal/forever undo" isn't a standard feature of modern computers. Perhaps in the future we'll see more of Jef's ideas put into practice.
- jfengel 5y ago
  I reviewed "The Human Interface" in a late manuscript stage, and was amused to note that it arrived to me as a double-spaced Courier with hand-drawn illustrations. That was a bit unexpected from a man who was instrumental in creating modern WYSIWYG interfaces. But of course, it's the right format for the job. He didn't need to format or illustrate it; the publisher had professionals for that. He needed to do the easy thing that got the content to those professionals. And yeah, the book absolutely changed my life. Or at least the way I design UI. I'm sorry ZUIs didn't take off. I incorporated them into things I was doing, but users didn't especially respond to them, so I stopped.
- jbm 5y ago
  The Humane Interface is amazing. I managed to build a consulting deal as a single 20-something dev in Tokyo in part due to being able to explain concepts I had learned in the Humane Interface. Even if I don't necessarily agree with everything in it, it gives a meaningful vantage point from which to offer constructive criticism of an interface. (Even just the advice about about avoiding modality was extremely helpful.)
  - nextos 5y ago
    This is interesting. Can you elaborate more on what had you learned? BTW, there's a Canon Cat emulator that runs on the browser at: https://archive.org/details/canoncat https://archive.org/details/canoncat
- totetsu 5y ago
  Prezi's interactive presentations seem quite zui like. I'd feel a bit embarrassingly out of date to use one now though.
keeganpoppen 5y ago
i could not recommend "the humane interface" more highly... not because every idea emanating from it came down from mt. sinai, but because it has such beautiful, coherent end-to-end user-experience-oriented analysis... i feel like anyone who cares about these sorts of things who reads it would immediately recognize the genius of the book / product / etc. which is not to say that the product itself was worthy of this level of praise-- the thoughtfulness and ... clarity of thought in its presentation makes it an incredible piece of work. funny to me that he wound up on the sidelines of mac / pc history (apple probably made the right choice btw), but the choices, thoughtfulness, etc. in the book are just beautiful and enlightening. a book worthy of ones' "books i actually give a shit about" bookshelf, as it is on mine. like... i would be willing to send this book to randos on hackernews should they prove interested-- that is how strongly i feel like this book should be consumed.
- keeganpoppen 5y ago
  the ZUI thing might be a bit silly, though. or maybe it is genius.
  - actionfromafar 5y ago
    People are very spatial, and the Desktop metaphor and file browser metaphor already taps into that.
    - keeganpoppen 5y ago
      agreed, i just think that the interfaces for interacting with this stuff spatially are always a bit lacking compared to the ideal. maybe with the right hardware / peripherals?
      - TuringTest 5y ago
        I strongly suspect that AR devices for productivity will greatly benefit for this kind of radical spatial information management, to the point of making it viable for information workers.
telchior 5y ago
Reading the help docs, I couldn't quite visualize what this "Leap" button was. There's no image (that I saw) of the Canon Cat keyboard on this site. Turns out the Leap keys are situated directly under the spacebar: https://www.theverge.com/2011/12/28/2665791/jeff-raskin-canon-cat-humane-ui https://www.theverge.com/2011/12/28/2665791/jeff-raskin-cano... For the way I type, with my thumb angled so the knuckle would hit the Leap key, that would be absolutely infuriating. But it's an interesting idea nonetheless. It also had a "Learn" key, which seems to have been used for constructing macros. Neat! The example they give for it is a find operation to replace "dog" with "cat". I think the vast majority of people who spend a lot of time in word processors today still don't know how to use macros, and part of that is an accessibility problem; what sub-menu (or sub-sub-menu) would that be hidden in? It's interesting to think of an alternate reality where users learned to create macros as part of using a computer. Maybe we'd have more coders if so.
- TuringTest 5y ago
  > For the way I type, with my thumb angled so the knuckle would hit the Leap key, that would be absolutely infuriating. But it's an interesting idea nonetheless. I've seen an adaptation[1] of the concept to a standard keyboard that used the Alt + Alt gr keys for Leap back/forward, and the result was quite usable. [1] the Archy project by Raskin's son Aza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software)
- glxxyz 5y ago
  Leap is basically two dedicated keys for incremental search forwards & backwards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c
dang 5y ago
Related: Demo of the Canon Cat computer released in 1987 with 'leap' feature [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29423545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29423545 - Dec 2021 (1 comment) Canon Cat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26213934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26213934 - Feb 2021 (31 comments) Leap Technology (keyboard vs. mouse on a Canon Cat machine, ca 1987) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22042900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22042900 - Jan 2020 (1 comment) Canon Cat Emulation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18032916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18032916 - Sept 2018 (2 comments) Canon Cat Resources – Jef Raskin's Forth-Powered Word Processing Appliance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14650365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14650365 - June 2017 (23 comments) The Canon Cat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6978587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6978587 - Dec 2013 (30 comments) (<-- "My uncle was one of the programmers on the Cat project") Canon Cat Documents Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3394546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3394546 - Dec 2011 (8 comments) Canon Cat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=595744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=595744 - May 2009 (15 comments)
- AlbertoGP 5y ago
  > Demo of the Canon Cat computer released in 1987 with 'leap' feature [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29423545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29423545 - Dec 2021 (1 comment) > Leap Technology (keyboard vs. mouse on a Canon Cat machine, ca 1987) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22042900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22042900 - Jan 2020 (1 comment) Wow, thanks! I did miss that story (same video in both HN discussions) which is very relevant to my interests. Watching the video, I find that the way I move around code in Emacs is very similar to the “Leap” technique in the Canon Cat, with exactly the benefits they claim. I even have a dedicated “Leap” thumb key in my keyboard, a programmable Dygma Raise (https://dygma.com/ https://dygma.com/) where I mapped one of the thumb keys to the “Find” keycode, and then that in Emacs to incremental search. It is still limited to the current buffer, whereas the Canon Cat’s Leap seems to work across documents. I hadn’t thought of that but there are ways to do it in Emacs, for instance searching interactively in all open buffers: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2641211/emacs-interactively-search-open-buffers https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2641211/emacs-interactiv...
musesum 5y ago
I was fortunate enough to visit Jef Raskin while the Cat under development. In his office was a fold-out futon chair and electronic piano. He even played a piece. Humane indeed! He recommended "The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction" (Card, Moran, et al) From that point forward, all roads led from Fitt's Law.
mikewarot 5y ago
Incremental search was a great idea, but it's like Jef bet the farm on that one idea. I find it incredible that it used to take getting a machine manufactured en masse to push out a UI idea like this. Now we can emulate any idea you want to try in a web browser, emulator, etc. It's surprising we don't have a flood of new OS ideas, but at least now we can run things like this in emulation.
- jll29 5y ago
  One hope is that thanks to retro computing at least a lot of the older ideas don't get lost. It's indeed surprising that there are not more new ideas around. Recent noise is only about bigger, faster and cheaper.
  - TuringTest 5y ago
    > It's indeed surprising that there are not more new ideas around. There are lots of new ideas... if you know where to look ;-) The problem is that, being new, they are neither widely distributed nor as well refined as the old ones. Keep an eye on 'modern note taking' productivity tools in the orbit of 'second brain' or 'networked thought'; they are upgrading many of the principles of the Canon Cat to the current networked environment, and follow through on the spirit of the classic "augmenting the human intelect" dream. I believe they have the potential to replace the outdated desktop metaphor, and offer a digitally native metaphor for information processing and productiviy.
    - ByThyGrace 5y ago
      No links, sources, places to start looking?
      - TuringTest 5y ago
        It's better to do an internet search for those terms, and look at what catches your eye according to your interests. There are many players pushing for their own understanding on how to reach that goal, and I would not promote any one over the others (especially as they all seem to be a bit unripe right now). Look for modern notetaking apps (Notion, Obsidian, logseq, Airtable, Roam Research... and "alternatives to" any of those) to see what style of knowledge management I'm talking about (there are two main varieties - the "outliner" and the "user-friendly relational database", with a lot of overlap between them).

101 points by jka 5y ago

I'm struggling to understand what was different about this device. All I've managed to gather so far is that there two cursors and two special "leap keys" on the keyboard. Anyone got a more informative summary?

glxxyz 5y ago
I posted it above but this video helps, skip the very slow demonstrations of cursor keys & mouse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c
gjvc 5y ago
that website is a bit anaemic -- google for canon cat for more content and form an opinion based on that
retrocryptid 5y ago
it boots to the same state it was in just before you shut it off. modern macs kind of do this, but most of the time the apps aren't quite the same.
timmaxw 5y ago
I found this page helpful: http://www.canoncat.org/canoncat/onlinehelp.html http://www.canoncat.org/canoncat/onlinehelp.html

jll29 5y ago

The UK also had a word processing applicatiom, the Amstrad PCW8256: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlsODXKOYX8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlsODXKOYX8 I would like to see a modern incarnation with e-Paper, an SSD and an editor with focus mode, presumably you could run around for a week without charging.

zelos 5y ago
Locoscript was a great piece of software. I remember switching from that to an early version of Word and being incredulous that in Word the entire line of text you were typing would flicker as you typed because it couldn't redraw the screen fast enough.
- Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
  And LocoScript wasn't even the fastest word-processing software on the PCW. (Protext was.) The PCW was such a well-conceived product. People were still using them as their main computer well into the '00s. I wrote some mapping software for it which LocoScript Software distributed - it did a creditable job of both display and routing despite having nothing more powerful than a 4MHz Z80.
  - lproven 5y ago
    FWIW, Protext for the PC (and Amiga, ST, & presumably 8-bit platforms too) is now legal freeware. https://web.archive.org/web/20140825104412/http://www.tigerteam.co.uk/protext/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140825104412/http://www.tigert...
lproven 5y ago
The PCW wasn't an app. It was a computer, able to run CP/M and thousands of apps. It also had a very conventional late-1980s UI. I love PCWs -- I still own 2 -- but comparing PCWs to the Canon Cat is a bit like saying that an Airbus A380 is a car, because it has wheels and an engine.

Apocryphon 5y ago

What would be the modern version of such a word processor?

TuringTest 5y ago
Second-generation outliners and data-heavy notetaking apps (Notion, Obsidian, logseq, Airtable, Roam Research...) provide similar functionality as a unified environment for all your information needs stored on a single device with a homogeneous interface. Though I'd say they have huge shortcomings in terms of usability with respect to using them solely from keyboard shortcuts, at least compared to the simple efficient model of the Canon Cat and its radically modeless interactions.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modeless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modeless

georgia_peach 5y ago

A word/excel appliance with a vim-clutch that gets in the way of the spacebar. I believe the market chose wisely in this particular case.

kwatsonafter 5y ago

Such an underrated computer. I think, "The Humane Interface" needs to be standard reading for anyone that designs computers or consumer electronics and ZUIs were such a good idea-- I wish there was a way to, "ZUIify" my Mac desktop so I could just have a massive, "nexus" of, "zoomimable" desktop spaces. I still don't understand why, "universal/forever undo" isn't a standard feature of modern computers. Perhaps in the future we'll see more of Jef's ideas put into practice.

jfengel 5y ago
I reviewed "The Human Interface" in a late manuscript stage, and was amused to note that it arrived to me as a double-spaced Courier with hand-drawn illustrations. That was a bit unexpected from a man who was instrumental in creating modern WYSIWYG interfaces. But of course, it's the right format for the job. He didn't need to format or illustrate it; the publisher had professionals for that. He needed to do the easy thing that got the content to those professionals. And yeah, the book absolutely changed my life. Or at least the way I design UI. I'm sorry ZUIs didn't take off. I incorporated them into things I was doing, but users didn't especially respond to them, so I stopped.
jbm 5y ago
The Humane Interface is amazing. I managed to build a consulting deal as a single 20-something dev in Tokyo in part due to being able to explain concepts I had learned in the Humane Interface. Even if I don't necessarily agree with everything in it, it gives a meaningful vantage point from which to offer constructive criticism of an interface. (Even just the advice about about avoiding modality was extremely helpful.)
- nextos 5y ago
  This is interesting. Can you elaborate more on what had you learned? BTW, there's a Canon Cat emulator that runs on the browser at: https://archive.org/details/canoncat https://archive.org/details/canoncat
totetsu 5y ago
Prezi's interactive presentations seem quite zui like. I'd feel a bit embarrassingly out of date to use one now though.

keeganpoppen 5y ago

i could not recommend "the humane interface" more highly... not because every idea emanating from it came down from mt. sinai, but because it has such beautiful, coherent end-to-end user-experience-oriented analysis... i feel like anyone who cares about these sorts of things who reads it would immediately recognize the genius of the book / product / etc. which is not to say that the product itself was worthy of this level of praise-- the thoughtfulness and ... clarity of thought in its presentation makes it an incredible piece of work. funny to me that he wound up on the sidelines of mac / pc history (apple probably made the right choice btw), but the choices, thoughtfulness, etc. in the book are just beautiful and enlightening. a book worthy of ones' "books i actually give a shit about" bookshelf, as it is on mine. like... i would be willing to send this book to randos on hackernews should they prove interested-- that is how strongly i feel like this book should be consumed.

keeganpoppen 5y ago
the ZUI thing might be a bit silly, though. or maybe it is genius.
- actionfromafar 5y ago
  People are very spatial, and the Desktop metaphor and file browser metaphor already taps into that.
  - keeganpoppen 5y ago
    agreed, i just think that the interfaces for interacting with this stuff spatially are always a bit lacking compared to the ideal. maybe with the right hardware / peripherals?
    - TuringTest 5y ago
      I strongly suspect that AR devices for productivity will greatly benefit for this kind of radical spatial information management, to the point of making it viable for information workers.

telchior 5y ago

Reading the help docs, I couldn't quite visualize what this "Leap" button was. There's no image (that I saw) of the Canon Cat keyboard on this site. Turns out the Leap keys are situated directly under the spacebar: https://www.theverge.com/2011/12/28/2665791/jeff-raskin-canon-cat-humane-ui https://www.theverge.com/2011/12/28/2665791/jeff-raskin-cano... For the way I type, with my thumb angled so the knuckle would hit the Leap key, that would be absolutely infuriating. But it's an interesting idea nonetheless. It also had a "Learn" key, which seems to have been used for constructing macros. Neat! The example they give for it is a find operation to replace "dog" with "cat". I think the vast majority of people who spend a lot of time in word processors today still don't know how to use macros, and part of that is an accessibility problem; what sub-menu (or sub-sub-menu) would that be hidden in? It's interesting to think of an alternate reality where users learned to create macros as part of using a computer. Maybe we'd have more coders if so.

TuringTest 5y ago
> For the way I type, with my thumb angled so the knuckle would hit the Leap key, that would be absolutely infuriating. But it's an interesting idea nonetheless. I've seen an adaptation[1] of the concept to a standard keyboard that used the Alt + Alt gr keys for Leap back/forward, and the result was quite usable. [1] the Archy project by Raskin's son Aza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software)
glxxyz 5y ago
Leap is basically two dedicated keys for incremental search forwards & backwards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c

dang 5y ago

Related: Demo of the Canon Cat computer released in 1987 with 'leap' feature [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29423545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29423545 - Dec 2021 (1 comment) Canon Cat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26213934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26213934 - Feb 2021 (31 comments) Leap Technology (keyboard vs. mouse on a Canon Cat machine, ca 1987) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22042900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22042900 - Jan 2020 (1 comment) Canon Cat Emulation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18032916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18032916 - Sept 2018 (2 comments) Canon Cat Resources – Jef Raskin's Forth-Powered Word Processing Appliance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14650365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14650365 - June 2017 (23 comments) The Canon Cat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6978587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6978587 - Dec 2013 (30 comments) (<-- "My uncle was one of the programmers on the Cat project") Canon Cat Documents Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3394546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3394546 - Dec 2011 (8 comments) Canon Cat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=595744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=595744 - May 2009 (15 comments)

AlbertoGP 5y ago
> Demo of the Canon Cat computer released in 1987 with 'leap' feature [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29423545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29423545 - Dec 2021 (1 comment) > Leap Technology (keyboard vs. mouse on a Canon Cat machine, ca 1987) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22042900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22042900 - Jan 2020 (1 comment) Wow, thanks! I did miss that story (same video in both HN discussions) which is very relevant to my interests. Watching the video, I find that the way I move around code in Emacs is very similar to the “Leap” technique in the Canon Cat, with exactly the benefits they claim. I even have a dedicated “Leap” thumb key in my keyboard, a programmable Dygma Raise (https://dygma.com/ https://dygma.com/) where I mapped one of the thumb keys to the “Find” keycode, and then that in Emacs to incremental search. It is still limited to the current buffer, whereas the Canon Cat’s Leap seems to work across documents. I hadn’t thought of that but there are ways to do it in Emacs, for instance searching interactively in all open buffers: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2641211/emacs-interactively-search-open-buffers https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2641211/emacs-interactiv...

musesum 5y ago

I was fortunate enough to visit Jef Raskin while the Cat under development. In his office was a fold-out futon chair and electronic piano. He even played a piece. Humane indeed! He recommended "The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction" (Card, Moran, et al) From that point forward, all roads led from Fitt's Law.

mikewarot 5y ago

Incremental search was a great idea, but it's like Jef bet the farm on that one idea. I find it incredible that it used to take getting a machine manufactured en masse to push out a UI idea like this. Now we can emulate any idea you want to try in a web browser, emulator, etc. It's surprising we don't have a flood of new OS ideas, but at least now we can run things like this in emulation.

jll29 5y ago
One hope is that thanks to retro computing at least a lot of the older ideas don't get lost. It's indeed surprising that there are not more new ideas around. Recent noise is only about bigger, faster and cheaper.
- TuringTest 5y ago
  > It's indeed surprising that there are not more new ideas around. There are lots of new ideas... if you know where to look ;-) The problem is that, being new, they are neither widely distributed nor as well refined as the old ones. Keep an eye on 'modern note taking' productivity tools in the orbit of 'second brain' or 'networked thought'; they are upgrading many of the principles of the Canon Cat to the current networked environment, and follow through on the spirit of the classic "augmenting the human intelect" dream. I believe they have the potential to replace the outdated desktop metaphor, and offer a digitally native metaphor for information processing and productiviy.
  - ByThyGrace 5y ago
    No links, sources, places to start looking?
    - TuringTest 5y ago
      It's better to do an internet search for those terms, and look at what catches your eye according to your interests. There are many players pushing for their own understanding on how to reach that goal, and I would not promote any one over the others (especially as they all seem to be a bit unripe right now). Look for modern notetaking apps (Notion, Obsidian, logseq, Airtable, Roam Research... and "alternatives to" any of those) to see what style of knowledge management I'm talking about (there are two main varieties - the "outliner" and the "user-friendly relational database", with a lot of overlap between them).