(2019-07-27) Meet The Canon Cat, The Forgotten 1987 Alternate-reality Mac

Meet the Canon Cat, the forgotten 1987 alternate-reality Mac. The Mac will always be identified with the year 1984. But 40 years ago, the Macintosh project started as an under-the-radar effort within Apple by Jef Raskin

Once the project came into Steve Jobs’s orbit, the Mac that was launched was a considerably different machine than what Raskin had intended. And by then, he had already left Apple. However, he never gave up on producing an “information appliance” that embodied what he called a humane interface. He got his chance in 1987 with the Canon Cat, a $1,495 “work processor”

The computer dispensed with conventions popularized by the Mac, such as menus, overlapping windows, and rows of icons. You turned on the machine and simply started typing to create a new document.
Within that document, you could create tables with formulas, similar to how you could with later integrated packages such as Microsoft Works or the modern web document processors Quip or Coda. The Cat even allowed you to include computer code in the middle of a document that could be executed with a button press.

Instead of a mouse, the Cat had two thumb-accessible buttons under its space bar for its signature navigation/selection feature, Leaping. Say, for example, you wanted to navigate to the word “feline” 150 lines up from the current cursor position (and thus off-screen). To move the cursor to the word, you would hold down the Leap key, type the first few letters (“fel”), and release the Leap key when the cursor arrived at its intended destination

Innovative though it was, the Cat did not take off. Canon sold only 20,000 units, according to oldcomputers.net, and quickly vanished from the market. Raskin allegedly blamed poor marketing. Other stories suggest a battle between the Cat team and those producing Canon’s traditional word processors, a parallel to the civil war that raged at Apple between the Apple II and Macintosh teams.

An even juicier theory stipulates that Steve Jobs, who was at his second computer startup, NeXT, when the Cat debuted, insisted that Canon kill the Cat.

The Internet Archive has a web-based emulator using the popular game system emulator MAME. You can also access a PDF of its manual and photos of its help screens.

Raskin continued developing the ideas behind the Cat long after its demise. And after he died in 2005, his son Aza continued them further, developing a launcher for Windows called Enso. Ultimately, the effort was turned over to open source where it failed to find developer support.

Even if Leap had achieved far greater success on the desktop, it likely would have translated poorly into the modern, mobile world.

Alas, one of the projects that never left Raskin’s drawing board was a Cat laptop that weighed about two pounds.