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Every time the Canon Cat comes up, I'm surprised no-one mentions the Amstrad PCW family and Locoscript. It was launched two years before the Canon Cat, and not

Every time the Canon Cat comes up, I'm surprised no-one mentions the Amstrad PCW family and Locoscript. It was launched two years before the Canon Cat, and not only made it to market but had roughly the same market penetration in the UK as lightbulbs. Given that a lot of Amstrad stuff wasn't exactly known for being the highest quality the PCW8256 and 8512 were surprisingly good for the £400 they cost (about a grand in today's money, roughly half the price of the Canon Cat). You got a fairly chunky computer about the size of a 14" TV with a green screen monitor which had a not-ridiculous persistence so no flickering and a fairly "gentle" colour. The 3" disks were a bit weird. The keyboard was a nicely clicky "spring over membrane" design that felt nearly as good as a proper mechanical one (not a patch on a Model M but better than most!) and had a bunch of buttons for commonly-used functions. If you pressed any of the modifier keys the menu at the top of the screen would change to show you what you could do. It even came with a dot-matrix printer that could do graphics after a fashion. You could buy a posher version with a white screen and a daisywheel printer, too, but they were more expensive and the printer was extremely slow and noisy. It was only slightly harder to get started with than a biro and a notepad. I wish Locoscript had won instead of MS Word.

lproven 4y ago
Yes and no. In terms of the function, yes. I have 2 PCWs and had another when they were new. I really like them. But the PCW was a clever application of old technology, using some then-fairly-recent but far from state-of-the-art tech to enhance some obsolete tech to make a minimum viable tool. It was a beefed-up CP/M machine, with a big RAMdisk, a hires graphics display, and a (very good) word processor as the primary app. The best word processor on any 8-bit ever, IMHO. But it was a lot more flexible and extensible than any of the other (many!) competing dedicated word processors of the time, because it had a big screen (using an old-tech CRT instead of a tiny grey LCD), and lots of storage for its obsolete OS, and a proper OS and so on. (All things that Amstrad failed to include in the PCW 10 and PCW 16, and so they flopped.) It was inspired to realise that rather than a crappy LCD, you could include a really good mono CRT. Rather than a crappy 16-bit chip, a really good 8-bit one. Rather than a crappy old disk, a much tougher but obscure new one, and make money on the media. Rather than a printer port and driver hell, a dedicated printer mechanism with no brains. Integrate it all so there isn't even a ROM. The Canon Cat was an inspired attempt to reinvent computing by getting away from the poor minicomputer-inspired UI conventions of 8-bit computers, by taking the basic hardware design and reinventing the entire software stack and UI from the ground up, using no existing tech other than a super-lightweight programming language. No OS, no apps, no concept of them. Barely even legacy minicomputer concepts like "files", and no "binaries" or "executables" or "programs" or "drive letters" of any of that 1960s/1970s historical baggage. It was a profoundly different take on the same core function. Any technological resemblance is almost a coincidence.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  I somewhat agree, but I don't see that Locoscript was really exposing much of the underlying OS to the user. It booted straight into Locoscript, with no CP/M-like functionality exposed. The application was booted directly by the bootloader which as you say was loaded itself by the not-really-ROM in the bloody great ASIC. People just put the "Start of Day" disk in the drive, powered it up, waited five seconds, and then picked the thing they'd worked on last with a single keystroke. Now I have to admit, I have never used a Canon Cat - I'm surprised I haven't even run across an emulation - but the videos I've seen of them in use didn't look all that different.
  - lproven 4y ago
    As I said, LocoScript is about the best WP I saw on any 8-bit. I don't want to denigrate it. But I suspect it achieved that because of 2 things: [1] It was written by 2 experienced developers, already veterans of the Data Recall Diamond system, as referenced here: https://www.theregister.com/Print/2015/09/09/joyce_turns_30/ https://www.theregister.com/Print/2015/09/09/joyce_turns_30/ [2] And because it came along late enough to be influenced by the new wave of 16-bit computers and GUIs and the combination of those and how they affected word processors. LocoScript didn't expose any CP/M functionality because it didn't run on CP/M. It used the disk structure, and that meant it could use CP/M User Areas as a single-layer directory structure, which was inspired. TBH for non-technical users, 8 flat folders & multiple disks is enough, I suspect. As for the Cat, yes, it was profoundly different, from the demo videos I've seen. Martin Wichary got lucky finding a cheap one. I've never seen a working one. :-(
    - Gordonjcp 4y ago
      I bet there's some bloody ASIC in a Canon Cat that's not in any meaningful way documented and renders it uncloneable and hard to emulate.
      - lproven 4y ago
        Not at all. Other posts in this thread have linked to emulators. There's one on the Internet Archive, which runs in your browser. https://archive.org/details/canoncat https://archive.org/details/canoncat

lproven 4y ago

Yes and no. In terms of the function, yes. I have 2 PCWs and had another when they were new. I really like them. But the PCW was a clever application of old technology, using some then-fairly-recent but far from state-of-the-art tech to enhance some obsolete tech to make a minimum viable tool. It was a beefed-up CP/M machine, with a big RAMdisk, a hires graphics display, and a (very good) word processor as the primary app. The best word processor on any 8-bit ever, IMHO. But it was a lot more flexible and extensible than any of the other (many!) competing dedicated word processors of the time, because it had a big screen (using an old-tech CRT instead of a tiny grey LCD), and lots of storage for its obsolete OS, and a proper OS and so on. (All things that Amstrad failed to include in the PCW 10 and PCW 16, and so they flopped.) It was inspired to realise that rather than a crappy LCD, you could include a really good mono CRT. Rather than a crappy 16-bit chip, a really good 8-bit one. Rather than a crappy old disk, a much tougher but obscure new one, and make money on the media. Rather than a printer port and driver hell, a dedicated printer mechanism with no brains. Integrate it all so there isn't even a ROM. The Canon Cat was an inspired attempt to reinvent computing by getting away from the poor minicomputer-inspired UI conventions of 8-bit computers, by taking the basic hardware design and reinventing the entire software stack and UI from the ground up, using no existing tech other than a super-lightweight programming language. No OS, no apps, no concept of them. Barely even legacy minicomputer concepts like "files", and no "binaries" or "executables" or "programs" or "drive letters" of any of that 1960s/1970s historical baggage. It was a profoundly different take on the same core function. Any technological resemblance is almost a coincidence.

Gordonjcp 4y ago
I somewhat agree, but I don't see that Locoscript was really exposing much of the underlying OS to the user. It booted straight into Locoscript, with no CP/M-like functionality exposed. The application was booted directly by the bootloader which as you say was loaded itself by the not-really-ROM in the bloody great ASIC. People just put the "Start of Day" disk in the drive, powered it up, waited five seconds, and then picked the thing they'd worked on last with a single keystroke. Now I have to admit, I have never used a Canon Cat - I'm surprised I haven't even run across an emulation - but the videos I've seen of them in use didn't look all that different.
- lproven 4y ago
  As I said, LocoScript is about the best WP I saw on any 8-bit. I don't want to denigrate it. But I suspect it achieved that because of 2 things: [1] It was written by 2 experienced developers, already veterans of the Data Recall Diamond system, as referenced here: https://www.theregister.com/Print/2015/09/09/joyce_turns_30/ https://www.theregister.com/Print/2015/09/09/joyce_turns_30/ [2] And because it came along late enough to be influenced by the new wave of 16-bit computers and GUIs and the combination of those and how they affected word processors. LocoScript didn't expose any CP/M functionality because it didn't run on CP/M. It used the disk structure, and that meant it could use CP/M User Areas as a single-layer directory structure, which was inspired. TBH for non-technical users, 8 flat folders & multiple disks is enough, I suspect. As for the Cat, yes, it was profoundly different, from the demo videos I've seen. Martin Wichary got lucky finding a cheap one. I've never seen a working one. :-(
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    I bet there's some bloody ASIC in a Canon Cat that's not in any meaningful way documented and renders it uncloneable and hard to emulate.
    - lproven 4y ago
      Not at all. Other posts in this thread have linked to emulators. There's one on the Internet Archive, which runs in your browser. https://archive.org/details/canoncat https://archive.org/details/canoncat