What was Canon Cat, the unique word processor developed by the creator of the Macintosh?
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The ' Canon Cat ', released by Canon in 1987, is a PC developed by Jeff Raskin, the creator of the Apple Macintosh. FastCompany, a business news site, explains what kind of PC the Canon Cat was.
Meet the Canon Cat, the forgotten 1987 alternate-reality Mac - Fast Company
https://www.fastcompany.com/90380553/meet-the-canon-cat-the-forgotten-1987-alternate-reality-mac
Jeff Raskin, who developed the Canon Cat, was Apple's publishing manager and launched the Macintosh development project with the concept of 'an easy-to-use and affordable device for the general public.' However, by the time the Macintosh development project was fully undertaken by Steve Jobs, Raskin had left Apple.
After leaving Apple, Raskin developed a text editing user interface called 'Swyft.' The main feature of Swyft was the two 'Leap' keys located under the keyboard, and by making full use of shortcuts that combined these Leap keys, the cursor could be quickly moved to the desired position in the text without using a mouse.
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You can see how to actually use the Leap key in the movie below.
Leap Technology - YouTube
The PC that used Swyft was the Canon Cat. The Canon Cat was a very simple machine with a 9-inch, 672 x 344 pixel monochrome display. It had a Motorola MC68000 CPU , 256KB of memory (RAM), and could store data on a 256KB 3.5-inch floppy disk.
The GUI was also very simple, with no menus, icons, or windows, and was designed to allow users to start creating documents as soon as they turned it on. It was also possible to embed tables, formulas, and code in documents, and run them at the touch of a button.
The following movie shows how to turn on and operate the Canon Cat.
Canon Cat - YouTube
The Internet Archive also provides an emulator that lets you experience Canon CAT from your browser.
Canon Cat Emulation: Jef Raskin: Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming: Internet Archive
https://archive.org/details/canoncat
The Canon Cat was a computer with a unique concept that focused on user-friendliness and efficient document creation, but it did not catch on. It is said that only 20,000 units were sold, and it soon disappeared from the market. Mr. Raskin commented that the reason the Canon Cat did not sell was due to a marketing failure.
FastCompany also introduces a theory that the reason for the discontinuation was an internal conflict between the Canon Cat development team and the conventional word processor development team. There are also rumors that Steve Jobs, who had already left Apple to found NeXT when the Canon Cat was released, strongly urged Canon to discontinue the Canon Cat.
Although Canon Cat failed, Raskin continued to develop the idea for Swyft. Raskin passed away in 2005, but his son, Asa Raskin, took over and developed the Windows launcher Enso Launcher and a Linux distribution called Enso , but the project is on hold at the time of writing.
While FastCompany acknowledges that there are still people who use keyboard-based input like Swyft to write, it also notes that 'even if Swyft and the Leap Key were much more successful on the desktop, they still wouldn't have worked in today's mobile world.'
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