Canon Cat

The Canon Cat was described in Byte magazine around October 1987.

''(EzraShapiro?, "A Spiritual Heir to the Macintosh", ByteMagazine, October1987, pp.121-123 ) -- http://www.landsnail.com/apple/local/cat/canon.html

My recollections of it (having read the article at the time, I never saw one).

• It was an all-in-one box, like the original AppleMacintosh
• It had no mouse
• JefRaskin contributed bigly to the design, which centered on the needs of writers
• DontModeMeIn was a big factor in the overall design
• Its operating system employed the ForthLanguage in new and interesting ways

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http://www.digibarn.com/collections/business-docs/raskin-mac-genesis/raskin-mac-genesis-1981.pdf

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The Cat was a 17 pound desktop computer system containing a built in 9" black-and-white bit-mapped monitor, a single 3.5-inch 256K floppy disk drive, and an IBM Selectric-style keyboard. It came with an extensive collection of applications stored in ROM. These applications supported word processing, spell checking, mail merging, calculator functions, communications, data retrieval, and programming in the FORTH or 68000 assembly languages. Also present in the ROM was a spelling dictionary based on the 90,000 word American Heritage Dictionary. System setup information and a small personal user dictionary were stored in 8K of battery backed up RAM.

-- http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=642

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External Links

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat

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CategoryHistory