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Canon Cat

Storia Informatica · 16.6K views · 2014-03-03 · 6:15

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Overview

A short Italian-language clip about the Canon Cat, a text-oriented personal computer from Canon designed by Jef Raskin, who started the Macintosh project. It shows the machine in use.

On Hacker News

HN uses it as a quick look at what using a Canon Cat was actually like, in threads on Raskin, command interfaces and early Macintosh history.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2016–2024

Topics

Demoscene & retrocomputingGUI, HCI & interface historyHistory of computing
Search by tags
canon catjef raskinretro computingtext editinguser interfaces

What people said

watersb · 2024-05 · Recommendation

Wow, of course.. didn't think of video. That video is great, a VCR tape collection of corporate demos by Jef Raskin's company, apparently for investors and resellers. YouTube suggested a short, informal demo posted only 10 years ago, about 6 minutes: [VIDEO] A bit less familiar with it so a quick and dirty video I suppose but a great demonstration of what it would be like to use one now. Essential history! Thanks!

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kragen · 2021-11 · Reference

Right, The Humane Environment, following on his work with the Canon Cat and the Macintosh, before Steve Jobs took over the project and made it into a better Lisa. Later they renamed THE to the more googlable "Archy", a pun on RCHI, the Raskin Center for the Humane Interface, shortly before Jef's surprising death from pancreatic cancer. Jef's son Aza unfortunately hasn't kept Jef's stuff online, and he also invented infinite scroll websites. Nice guy though. LEAP was Emacs incremental-search, but on the Cat the idea was to use it to replace all cursor movement except "creep" left and right arrows. Thanks for the video! I had never seen it. YT suggested [VIDEO] , another Cat video. [LINK] shows a brief clip of the Forth interpreter.

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marttt · 2020-01 · Reference

More on the Canon Cat: [VIDEO] [LINK] There are also a few previous HN discussions on this machine. EDIT: I just have to post this lovely scene from the original video separately. This is about human-computer interaction after all, isn't it! [LINK] Aren't we actually approaching an age where this kind of (almost-)single-purpose machines might be making a comeback? The focus this model seems to allow or enforce on the user feels kind of... healthy.

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Sources

Video by Storia Informatica, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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