5 ms·

Refurb Weekend: Canon Cat

132 points by zdw 2y ago

kreelman 2y ago
If you've not got the hardware, the Canon Cat can be run in emulation mode via the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/canoncat https://archive.org/details/canoncat I bought Jeff Raskin's book years ago in a moment of inspiration.... His ideas were thoughtful, but perhaps impractical? That was my impression nonetheless.
- jbm 2y ago
  I loved his book (the Humane Interface). I even used ideas from it to create RFPs for a client, and was able to better critique ideas. Not having modes is still a big deal for me. Getting lost in menus and "not being able to get back" was something I dealt with a lot, and having this spell out my frustrations was very helpful. That said, he really loved the interface of the Canon Cat; I had no idea what it was when it existed, and I only know of it through Wikipedia.
unkoman 2y ago
That was a great read into a part of retro computing that I haven't seen before.
userbinator 2y ago
"token-threaded" Forth, which instead of storing direct execution addresses for each instruction in a Forth word executes using smaller tokens which are looked up instead. This exchanges the cost of an indirect lookup in a table for substantially greater code density. In other words, like a bytecode VM? The "ROM" at IC11 is actually an 8K 150ns static RAM, an NEC D4364C with specific support for battery backup. The service manual calls this the SV-RAM. This is what the CR2032 battery powers at the southeast (lower right) corner. A CR2032 is surprising for a computer from 1987, given that AFAIK PC mobos didn't have them until the 90s at the earliest.
- classichasclass 2y ago
  (author) > In other words, like a bytecode VM? Kind of, but it's still Forth of the era, so it's still threaded execution. You're still jumping from execution address to execution address (either native 68000 code or another set of Forth words heralded by a JMP to the nesting subroutine); you just have a layer of indirection by having to look them up in the token table first.
- p_l 2y ago
  Forth style threaded code was used not just for Forth - it was popular strategy for implementing higher level languages at one point, especially to reduce size of resulting binaries. Funnily enough, some later more advanced compiler systems could be considered to have bits resembling that in code generation, with Virtual OPerations that abstracted CPU instructions (often more than one). And indeed, threaded interpreters are one of the efficient ways to implement VMs in resource constrained setups.
- datpiff 2y ago
  > A CR2032 is surprising for a computer from 1987, given that AFAIK PC mobos didn't have them until the 90s at the earliest. Nintendo Famicom cartridges started using them the same year, 87. PCs probably didn't need the space-saving advantage until a few years later.
- abruzzi 2y ago
  Yamaha used a CR2032 with legs as battery backup for sounds in most of their synthesizers starting at least with the DX7 that launched in 1983. So there is precedent.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
astral303 2y ago
Jef Raskin’s “Humane Interface” book was such an eye opener for me—-no modes (that explained why I was always frustrated with vi or emacs), and that computers should never lose your data. From this post I learned there was a project called Archy implementing Cat in software. The core principles still ring so very true: https://web.archive.org/web/20061025010636/http://rchi.raskincenter.org/index.php?title=Core_Principles https://web.archive.org/web/20061025010636/http://rchi.raski... > Computer rage is a familiar phenomenon because computers are so adept at losing your data. At any given moment, you are one innocent step away from destroying minutes, hours, days, months, or years of work. > Archy never loses your work. This shouldn't be a groundbreaking innovation in computer design, but it is. You never have to save because it's done for you automatically. Your data is stored in such a way that if your computer crashes, your information will still be there the next time you start Archy up. I think these days we are 70-80% to this groundbreaking innovation—-my computers no longer lose my in-progress e-mail or documents, but sure still keep losing form input here and there, and I still accidentally select all text and type over it in a system with a single-level undo (iOS).
- tambourine_man 2y ago
  iOS has more than a single level undo, but it’s terrible at exposing it and easily over writable by mistake.
  - hedora 2y ago
    Also, first-party apps like Notes have started reinventing modal interfaces. sigh
  - astral303 2y ago
    Oops, my mistake.. yeah, it does have multiple levels of undo. My favorite 3-way merge tool, kdiff3, has no undo.
- mikewarot 2y ago
  Thanks to Moore's law, and this excellent essay by the late, great Michael O'Connor Clarke[1] and our largely successful KillSave campaign, we at least have autosave as a widely adopted measure of sanity. It's better than nothing. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080621173441/http://killsave.org/Killsave_Manifesto.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20080621173441/http://killsave.o...
mft_ 2y ago
Fascinating to imagine that but for an unfortunate marketing approach (and some limited unfortunate product decisions) Canon might have had a significant future --and now a legacy-- in computing!
- gedy 2y ago
  Canon gets a lot of heat for the failure, but it was not an "obvious" interface imo, unlike WIMP interfaces. I have a faint memory of trying a Canon Cat, and it just made no sense to my young eyes, and that was before I had a computer with a GUI (had used Apples and C64s before this)
nxobject 2y ago
Well, now I'm jealous: how the hell did he find one? A vintage meet or something? I have eBay alerts for a Canon Cat.
- pmarreck 2y ago
  I was going to say, I couldn't find a single one on eBay, even via "Completed Listings"! Maybe we should form a group of the 10 people interested in a Canon Cat? lol
  - stavros 2y ago
    Where are you going to find eight more people?
    - mschnell 2y ago
      Count me in.
  - nxobject 2y ago
    I'm absolutely tickled pink by the idea of a niche collectors-who've-yet-to-find-anything-club. Time to make some membership cards... and if we find one, buy timeshares...
- polpo 2y ago
  I don’t know where he got his, but last August there was one on shopgoodwill.com. I was tipped to it on a small retrocomputing Discord server but I stupidly forgot to bid on it. There were only 2 bids and whoever won the auction only paid $26 for it.
- classichasclass 2y ago
  (author) This one has actually been in my collection for around a decade and is not a recent acquisition. I've just started playing with it more and figured I needed to shore it up to keep it going.
- mayoff 2y ago
apricot 2y ago
In the 1990s, I worked on a Canon typewriter (AP800) that had a similar-looking keyboard. That keyboard is the best I've ever had the pleasure to type on and I've tried quite a lot, including IBM Models M and F, all Cherry colors, Topre, etc. I could type for hours on that thing and not get tired. I would love to get my hands on a Cat to see if the keyboard is as good as that one was.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  That's interesting; can you articulate specifically what the keyboard is doing better than others? (Lower activation force, more obvious clicking, ...)
Animats 2y ago
That might be something to put on a Chromebook, for people who want a typewriter that can't do much else.
throwanem 2y ago
> Raskin was emphatic that the Swyft and Cat should not have modes — when you release the keys, the operation is over, whatever that ends up meaning. But that's not what this is. Search is a mode; it's just one that, in the Cat design, requires holding down a key to keep active, and by dint of modelessness as a design goal also fails at discoverability. (How do you cancel a search?)
- jecel 2y ago
  Rasking recommended cancelling searches by mashing the keyboard randomly to extend what you had typed so far with something that was sure to not be found in your text. The search advances with each new key you type while holding "leap". I agree that this was not discoverable at all, though it is trivial to learn. I don't know if backspacing while leaping would backtrack the search, but if that was the case it would have been what I would have tried (this would be just a little slower than Jef's suggestion).
  - throwanem 2y ago
    Huh. That's a lot of weird effort and loss of cognitive focus, just to net out at nothing. As with having to hold down a key because the designer refuses to admit the mode it invokes is a mode, by modern standards this seems all not very completely thought out. The idea of using incremental search transparently for both navigation and retrieval does appeal - I could see adding that to Emacs, as a union of isearch and occur, maybe - but we've learned a lot about interaction design in the intervening decades which leads me to feel the veneration of Raskin may often obstruct evenhanded critique of his work: as with Jobs, people seem to confuse the appellation of "visionary" with a guarantee that its recipient's vision was perfect.
    - jecel 2y ago
      Jef considered holding down a key to be a "quasi mode". It is like the difference between the shift key and the caps lock key.
      - 2y ago

132 points by zdw 2y ago

If you've not got the hardware, the Canon Cat can be run in emulation mode via the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/canoncat https://archive.org/details/canoncat I bought Jeff Raskin's book years ago in a moment of inspiration.... His ideas were thoughtful, but perhaps impractical? That was my impression nonetheless.

jbm 2y ago
I loved his book (the Humane Interface). I even used ideas from it to create RFPs for a client, and was able to better critique ideas. Not having modes is still a big deal for me. Getting lost in menus and "not being able to get back" was something I dealt with a lot, and having this spell out my frustrations was very helpful. That said, he really loved the interface of the Canon Cat; I had no idea what it was when it existed, and I only know of it through Wikipedia.

unkoman 2y ago

That was a great read into a part of retro computing that I haven't seen before.

userbinator 2y ago

"token-threaded" Forth, which instead of storing direct execution addresses for each instruction in a Forth word executes using smaller tokens which are looked up instead. This exchanges the cost of an indirect lookup in a table for substantially greater code density. In other words, like a bytecode VM? The "ROM" at IC11 is actually an 8K 150ns static RAM, an NEC D4364C with specific support for battery backup. The service manual calls this the SV-RAM. This is what the CR2032 battery powers at the southeast (lower right) corner. A CR2032 is surprising for a computer from 1987, given that AFAIK PC mobos didn't have them until the 90s at the earliest.

classichasclass 2y ago
(author) > In other words, like a bytecode VM? Kind of, but it's still Forth of the era, so it's still threaded execution. You're still jumping from execution address to execution address (either native 68000 code or another set of Forth words heralded by a JMP to the nesting subroutine); you just have a layer of indirection by having to look them up in the token table first.
p_l 2y ago
Forth style threaded code was used not just for Forth - it was popular strategy for implementing higher level languages at one point, especially to reduce size of resulting binaries. Funnily enough, some later more advanced compiler systems could be considered to have bits resembling that in code generation, with Virtual OPerations that abstracted CPU instructions (often more than one). And indeed, threaded interpreters are one of the efficient ways to implement VMs in resource constrained setups.
datpiff 2y ago
> A CR2032 is surprising for a computer from 1987, given that AFAIK PC mobos didn't have them until the 90s at the earliest. Nintendo Famicom cartridges started using them the same year, 87. PCs probably didn't need the space-saving advantage until a few years later.
abruzzi 2y ago
Yamaha used a CR2032 with legs as battery backup for sounds in most of their synthesizers starting at least with the DX7 that launched in 1983. So there is precedent.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

astral303 2y ago

Jef Raskin’s “Humane Interface” book was such an eye opener for me—-no modes (that explained why I was always frustrated with vi or emacs), and that computers should never lose your data. From this post I learned there was a project called Archy implementing Cat in software. The core principles still ring so very true: https://web.archive.org/web/20061025010636/http://rchi.raskincenter.org/index.php?title=Core_Principles https://web.archive.org/web/20061025010636/http://rchi.raski... > Computer rage is a familiar phenomenon because computers are so adept at losing your data. At any given moment, you are one innocent step away from destroying minutes, hours, days, months, or years of work. > Archy never loses your work. This shouldn't be a groundbreaking innovation in computer design, but it is. You never have to save because it's done for you automatically. Your data is stored in such a way that if your computer crashes, your information will still be there the next time you start Archy up. I think these days we are 70-80% to this groundbreaking innovation—-my computers no longer lose my in-progress e-mail or documents, but sure still keep losing form input here and there, and I still accidentally select all text and type over it in a system with a single-level undo (iOS).

tambourine_man 2y ago
iOS has more than a single level undo, but it’s terrible at exposing it and easily over writable by mistake.
- hedora 2y ago
  Also, first-party apps like Notes have started reinventing modal interfaces. sigh
- astral303 2y ago
  Oops, my mistake.. yeah, it does have multiple levels of undo. My favorite 3-way merge tool, kdiff3, has no undo.
mikewarot 2y ago
Thanks to Moore's law, and this excellent essay by the late, great Michael O'Connor Clarke[1] and our largely successful KillSave campaign, we at least have autosave as a widely adopted measure of sanity. It's better than nothing. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080621173441/http://killsave.org/Killsave_Manifesto.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20080621173441/http://killsave.o...

mft_ 2y ago

Fascinating to imagine that but for an unfortunate marketing approach (and some limited unfortunate product decisions) Canon might have had a significant future --and now a legacy-- in computing!

gedy 2y ago
Canon gets a lot of heat for the failure, but it was not an "obvious" interface imo, unlike WIMP interfaces. I have a faint memory of trying a Canon Cat, and it just made no sense to my young eyes, and that was before I had a computer with a GUI (had used Apples and C64s before this)

nxobject 2y ago

Well, now I'm jealous: how the hell did he find one? A vintage meet or something? I have eBay alerts for a Canon Cat.

pmarreck 2y ago
I was going to say, I couldn't find a single one on eBay, even via "Completed Listings"! Maybe we should form a group of the 10 people interested in a Canon Cat? lol
- stavros 2y ago
  Where are you going to find eight more people?
  - mschnell 2y ago
    Count me in.
- nxobject 2y ago
  I'm absolutely tickled pink by the idea of a niche collectors-who've-yet-to-find-anything-club. Time to make some membership cards... and if we find one, buy timeshares...
polpo 2y ago
I don’t know where he got his, but last August there was one on shopgoodwill.com. I was tipped to it on a small retrocomputing Discord server but I stupidly forgot to bid on it. There were only 2 bids and whoever won the auction only paid $26 for it.
classichasclass 2y ago
(author) This one has actually been in my collection for around a decade and is not a recent acquisition. I've just started playing with it more and figured I needed to shore it up to keep it going.
mayoff 2y ago

apricot 2y ago

In the 1990s, I worked on a Canon typewriter (AP800) that had a similar-looking keyboard. That keyboard is the best I've ever had the pleasure to type on and I've tried quite a lot, including IBM Models M and F, all Cherry colors, Topre, etc. I could type for hours on that thing and not get tired. I would love to get my hands on a Cat to see if the keyboard is as good as that one was.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
That's interesting; can you articulate specifically what the keyboard is doing better than others? (Lower activation force, more obvious clicking, ...)

Animats 2y ago

That might be something to put on a Chromebook, for people who want a typewriter that can't do much else.

throwanem 2y ago

> Raskin was emphatic that the Swyft and Cat should not have modes — when you release the keys, the operation is over, whatever that ends up meaning. But that's not what this is. Search is a mode; it's just one that, in the Cat design, requires holding down a key to keep active, and by dint of modelessness as a design goal also fails at discoverability. (How do you cancel a search?)

jecel 2y ago
Rasking recommended cancelling searches by mashing the keyboard randomly to extend what you had typed so far with something that was sure to not be found in your text. The search advances with each new key you type while holding "leap". I agree that this was not discoverable at all, though it is trivial to learn. I don't know if backspacing while leaping would backtrack the search, but if that was the case it would have been what I would have tried (this would be just a little slower than Jef's suggestion).
- throwanem 2y ago
  Huh. That's a lot of weird effort and loss of cognitive focus, just to net out at nothing. As with having to hold down a key because the designer refuses to admit the mode it invokes is a mode, by modern standards this seems all not very completely thought out. The idea of using incremental search transparently for both navigation and retrieval does appeal - I could see adding that to Emacs, as a union of isearch and occur, maybe - but we've learned a lot about interaction design in the intervening decades which leads me to feel the veneration of Raskin may often obstruct evenhanded critique of his work: as with Jobs, people seem to confuse the appellation of "visionary" with a guarantee that its recipient's vision was perfect.
  - jecel 2y ago
    Jef considered holding down a key to be a "quasi mode". It is like the difference between the shift key and the caps lock key.
    - 2y ago