Canon Cat -- what's it really like? - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

3 Mar 2005

...
 From: "Cameron Kaiser" <spectre at
floodgap.com>

   I'd love to get some information on the
memory and I/O
 mapping. It expects to use particular printers so it would
 be nice to rewrite the driver to work well with my 3SI. 
I wonder if anyone has tried to write an emulator. The Cat is getting a
lot more attention after Raskin's passing.

How easily could the Cat run arbitrary applications? Or was it an
editor, always an editor, all the time (with goodies), the Forth mode
notwithstanding?

Hi
 Even in the Forth mode, it was still an editor. It is
a little hard to describe from this sense. You could pick
stuff with the select and then you execute it.
 It would be hard to create a software only emulator.
The physical keyboard was as important as the software
on this machine. Talking with Jeff, he said that
several efforts have been made to get the keyboards on
PC to work but there are just too many variations on
how the keyboards are handled. It was left too much up to
the builder of the machines. You really need low level
access to key strokes and the layout is wrong as well.
Dwight