[HN Gopher] Refurb Weekend: Canon Cat
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Refurb Weekend: Canon Cat
Author : zdw
Score : 121 points
Date : 2024-05-28 03:55 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (oldvcr.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (oldvcr.blogspot.com)
| kreelman wrote:
| If you've not got the hardware, the Canon Cat can be run in
| emulation mode via the Internet Archive,
| https://archive.org/details/canoncat
|
| I bought Jeff Raskin's book years ago in a moment of
| inspiration.... His ideas were thoughtful, but perhaps
| impractical? That was my impression nonetheless.
| jbm wrote:
| I loved his book (the Humane Interface). I even used ideas from
| it to create RFPs for a client, and was able to better critique
| ideas.
|
| Not having modes is still a big deal for me. Getting lost in
| menus and "not being able to get back" was something I dealt
| with a lot, and having this spell out my frustrations was very
| helpful.
|
| That said, he really loved the interface of the Canon Cat; I
| had no idea what it was when it existed, and I only know of it
| through Wikipedia.
| unkoman wrote:
| That was a great read into a part of retro computing that I
| haven't seen before.
| userbinator wrote:
| _" token-threaded" Forth, which instead of storing direct
| execution addresses for each instruction in a Forth word executes
| using smaller tokens which are looked up instead. This exchanges
| the cost of an indirect lookup in a table for substantially
| greater code density._
|
| In other words, like a bytecode VM?
|
| _The "ROM" at IC11 is actually an 8K 150ns static RAM, an NEC
| D4364C with specific support for battery backup. The service
| manual calls this the SV-RAM. This is what the CR2032 battery
| powers at the southeast (lower right) corner._
|
| A CR2032 is surprising for a computer from 1987, given that AFAIK
| PC mobos didn't have them until the 90s at the earliest.
| classichasclass wrote:
| (author)
|
| > In other words, like a bytecode VM?
|
| Kind of, but it's still Forth of the era, so it's still
| threaded execution. You're still jumping from execution address
| to execution address (either native 68000 code or another set
| of Forth words heralded by a JMP to the nesting subroutine);
| you just have a layer of indirection by having to look them up
| in the token table first.
| p_l wrote:
| Forth style threaded code was used not just for Forth - it was
| popular strategy for implementing higher level languages at one
| point, especially to reduce size of resulting binaries.
|
| Funnily enough, some later more advanced compiler systems could
| be considered to have bits resembling that in code generation,
| with Virtual OPerations that abstracted CPU instructions (often
| more than one).
|
| And indeed, threaded interpreters are one of the efficient ways
| to implement VMs in resource constrained setups.
| datpiff wrote:
| > A CR2032 is surprising for a computer from 1987, given that
| AFAIK PC mobos didn't have them until the 90s at the earliest.
|
| Nintendo Famicom cartridges started using them the same year,
| 87. PCs probably didn't need the space-saving advantage until a
| few years later.
| abruzzi wrote:
| Yamaha used a CR2032 with legs as battery backup for sounds in
| most of their synthesizers starting at least with the DX7 that
| launched in 1983. So there is precedent.
| astral303 wrote:
| Jef Raskin's "Humane Interface" book was such an eye opener for
| me---no modes (that explained why I was always frustrated with vi
| or emacs), and that computers should never lose your data.
|
| From this post I learned there was a project called Archy
| implementing Cat in software.
|
| The core principles still ring so very true:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20061025010636/http://rchi.raski...
|
| > Computer rage is a familiar phenomenon because computers are so
| adept at losing your data. At any given moment, you are one
| innocent step away from destroying minutes, hours, days, months,
| or years of work.
|
| > Archy never loses your work. This shouldn't be a groundbreaking
| innovation in computer design, but it is. You never have to save
| because it's done for you automatically. Your data is stored in
| such a way that if your computer crashes, your information will
| still be there the next time you start Archy up.
|
| I think these days we are 70-80% to this groundbreaking
| innovation---my computers no longer lose my in-progress e-mail or
| documents, but sure still keep losing form input here and there,
| and I still accidentally select all text and type over it in a
| system with a single-level undo (iOS).
| tambourine_man wrote:
| iOS has more than a single level undo, but it's terrible at
| exposing it and easily over writable by mistake.
| hedora wrote:
| Also, first-party apps like Notes have started reinventing
| modal interfaces.
|
| _sigh_
| astral303 wrote:
| Oops, my mistake.. yeah, it does have multiple levels of
| undo.
|
| My favorite 3-way merge tool, kdiff3, has no undo.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Thanks to Moore's law, and this excellent essay by the late,
| great Michael O'Connor Clarke[1] and our largely successful
| KillSave campaign, we at least have autosave as a widely
| adopted measure of sanity. It's better than nothing.
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20080621173441/http://killsave.o...
| kilpikaarna wrote:
| Ugh, I loathe autosave popping up in more and more places,
| particularly webapps. I've messed up the working copy of my
| wife's business website and various docs more than once
| because she's asked me to fix or tweak something. I
| automatically change some random things around in
| Squaredpace/Webnode/Canva just to get a feel for a tool I've
| never used and discover how the workflow might compare to
| something I'm familiar with. Then I find out there's no undo
| or it doesn't revert everything, I have no idea what changes
| I've made vs the original, and it's autosaved. Terrible UX!
|
| Autosave has no place outside anything more complex than a
| simple text form, unless it's solely a backup solution for
| crashes, or paired with a very solid version control system.
| samatman wrote:
| Agreed, autosave is wrong, because save is, among other
| things, a destructive operation: it obliterates the old
| version of what you save. That should require a decision by
| the user.
|
| What macOS native apps all do, and have for years, is the
| right thing. They save your work, but not in your file.
| Open something, make modifications, close the program, open
| it: the modifications are still there. Crash? When you
| reboot, you still have your work. You save when you're
| ready to replace the old version with the new one, the
| program doesn't make that choice for you.
|
| Mostly they don't save undo history between boots, though,
| and that's too bad. Ideally every format in which people
| actually do the work would be non-destructive, preserving
| an undo history back to whatever the initial state of the
| file was. Photoshop got this right, so it's common in image
| editing, but it should work everywhere.
|
| Clearly you don't usually want finished work to contain the
| complete edit history, so exporting a rendered version is
| essential. But this isn't a difficult problem.
| guenthert wrote:
| That seems to be an odd formulation of a call for crash-only
| software.
|
| https://dslab.epfl.ch/pubs/crashonly.pdf
| mft_ wrote:
| Fascinating to imagine that but for an unfortunate marketing
| approach (and some limited unfortunate product decisions) Canon
| might have had a significant future --and now a legacy-- in
| computing!
| gedy wrote:
| Canon gets a lot of heat for the failure, but it was not an
| "obvious" interface imo, unlike WIMP interfaces. I have a faint
| memory of trying a Canon Cat, and it just made no sense to my
| young eyes, and that was before I had a computer with a GUI
| (had used Apples and C64s before this)
| nxobject wrote:
| Well, now I'm jealous: how the hell did he find one? A vintage
| meet or something? I have eBay alerts for a Canon Cat.
| pmarreck wrote:
| I was going to say, I couldn't find a single one on eBay, even
| via "Completed Listings"!
|
| Maybe we should form a group of the 10 people interested in a
| Canon Cat? lol
| stavros wrote:
| Where are you going to find eight more people?
| mschnell wrote:
| Count me in.
| polpo wrote:
| I don't know where he got his, but last August there was one on
| shopgoodwill.com. I was tipped to it on a small retrocomputing
| Discord server but I stupidly forgot to bid on it. There were
| only 2 bids and whoever won the auction only paid $26 for it.
| classichasclass wrote:
| (author) This one has actually been in my collection for around
| a decade and is not a recent acquisition. I've just started
| playing with it more and figured I needed to shore it up to
| keep it going.
| mayoff wrote:
| I bought one on eBay in 2000 for $610 (eBay item number
| 418348564).
| apricot wrote:
| In the 1990s, I worked on a Canon typewriter (AP800) that had a
| similar-looking keyboard. That keyboard is the best I've ever had
| the pleasure to type on and I've tried quite a lot, including IBM
| Models M and F, all Cherry colors, Topre, etc. I could type for
| hours on that thing and not get tired. I would love to get my
| hands on a Cat to see if the keyboard is as good as that one was.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| That's interesting; can you articulate specifically what the
| keyboard is doing better than others? (Lower activation force,
| more obvious clicking, ...)
| Animats wrote:
| That might be something to put on a Chromebook, for people who
| want a typewriter that can't do much else.
| throwanem wrote:
| > Raskin was emphatic that the Swyft and Cat should not have
| modes -- when you release the keys, the operation is over,
| whatever that ends up meaning.
|
| But that's not what this is. Search _is_ a mode; it 's just one
| that, in the Cat design, requires holding down a key to keep
| active, and by dint of modelessness as a design goal also fails
| at discoverability. (How do you cancel a search?)
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