From: "Eric F." <elf at ucsd.edu>
The recent death of Mr. Raskin has me Google'ing around for information
about his Canon Cat machine.
Even prior to his passing, I have always thought it a sweet looking machine.
Does anyone of this list own a Canon Cat? If so, do you use it for any sort
of regular everyday work? And what's your personal impression of the machine?
Is it even possible to use it in the context of today's work demands (i.e.,
for email)? Or is a proper network interface & appropriate software the
limiting factor here?
Hi
I have a Cat. There are some companies that still use
these as editing machines. That is why they seem to be
missing from the collector group in general. I got mine
from Al Kossow. I had to replace the lithium battery in
it
but it otherwise works OK.
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 could imagine that if I were doing a lot of writing
for college or writing a book, I'd find the editor a real
advantage.
It has one other nice feature. One can write out a formula
and it will give you the answer. It is kind of like having
a spread sheet in your text.
Of course, if you know the secret key sequence, you can
bring it into the Forth mode. From here, you can access
the inner machine as well. You can write Forth code and
execute it in the text as well. It then becomes a spread
sheet plus at that point.
Still, it is primarily a text machine in black and white.
I talked with Jeff about two years ago. He definitely
had interesting ideas about computer interfaces. He
didn't think much of the mouse. Besides being the major
source of carpal tunnel syndrome (sp?) it is a real time
waster for most applications.
The machines code wasn't completely written in Forth
but Jeff does attribute the quick software development
and the fact that there were no errors found in the released
version to using Forth in the creation of code.
Forth tends to make a person do incremental testing as
the code is written. This often helps to produce error
free code in the final product.
Dwight