I'll trade it for an Altair and an Apple 1 and most importantly, one of those rare black AppleIIplus's. What the heck is a FlatCat (uh oh, me thinks I just set myself up here). It'd be nice to find out what printers worked with it (I hear that Canon shipped a Diablo daisy wheel with it, I'll have to scrounge through the garage one of these days, I think I have one sitting around). It doesn't have cursor keys, or a pointing device. It uses these two 'leap' keys at the botton/center of the keyboard (just below the space bar). You hold one of the keys down and type the text you want to jump to. You could also jump (leap) paragraphs or even whole documents. Kinda funky. My wife seemed to pick it up pretty quickly (she thinks it all so cute with the word "cat" written in fancy letters on the keyboard). The "OS" and "BIOS" are written in Forth and apparently there is a way to access the Forth environment. It also saves/loads the entire machine state to floppy (versus saving individual files). Like I said, a funky little machine. Too bad that it'll be boxed and not seen for several months (gonna be moving soon, hopefully this apartment hopping will end soon, too dang many computers to move!). Let me know when you get the Apple 1 and I'll dig the Cat out and send it to you :) George

Some have expressed an interest in what I find out about the Canon Cat so here is some extra info that I've attained. It is possible to access the machines Forth interpreter. You type in a secret code, select it and hit the "answer" key. You can then enter Forth text, select it and press "answer" to execute it. You can also get to the interpreter itself by then pressing another set of keys. It works and is quite cool. If there are any other Cat owners out there, email me and I'll send you the exact instructions. Hey Uncle Roger, I located _the_ Flat Cat (yes, apparently the only one), unfortunately it's not for sale (well, actually I didn't ask, but I assumed that I wouldn't want to pay whatever the asking price would be). Unless of course you dug up that Apple 1 and they might trade you. The machine is also saving and loading state correctly to the floppy drive (remember it doesn't use files, it just saves and loads its entire machine state) so pretty much everything appears to be functional. Next step is to hook up a printer and see if I can get that working. Unfortunately, it's time to start boxing up to begin the move, so it'll have to wait a couple of months. I envy all you non-transient collectors out there. George