[HN Gopher] The Canon Cat, the forgotten 1987 alternate-reality ...
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The Canon Cat, the forgotten 1987 alternate-reality Mac (2019)
Author : jdblair
Score : 73 points
Date : 2024-06-01 08:16 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fastcompany.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fastcompany.com)
| linschn wrote:
| The "leap" description makes me think of emacs' avy
| https://github.com/abo-abo/avy
|
| The interface should not be too hard to reimplement as an emacs
| mode.
|
| One more project on the "someday" list...
| tetris11 wrote:
| I interpreted it more as the default reverse string search (C-r
| "substring")
| fzzzy wrote:
| Sure, but i think the innovation was the dedicated leap keys.
| You hold the key, type to incrementally search, and let go to
| leap. One key for forward and one for back.
|
| Also, leaping was through eveything in the whole os, not just
| the application.
| compressedgas wrote:
| https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/QuasimodeSearch
| shrubble wrote:
| Since almost everyone uses USB keyboards, I am surprised that a
| small addon board with just 2 keycaps that can be placed near
| the spacebar, hasn't already been made. Could do it with a
| Teensy or anything else that exposes HID, I think.
| wormius wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _Refurb Weekend: Canon Cat_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40497171 - May 2024 (35
| comments)
|
| _The Canon Cat: the little computer that could have changed the
| world_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34133701 - Dec 2022
| (28 comments)
|
| _Bitters: A text editor inspired by the Canon Cat_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33930276 - Dec 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Design Considerations for an Anthropophilic Computer (1979)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33287858 - Oct 2022 (3
| comments)
|
| _The Canon Cat_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33285665
| - Oct 2022 (160 comments)
|
| _Leap Technology (1987) [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33137433 - Oct 2022 (40
| comments)
|
| _The Canon Cat: The Writing Information Appliance (2004)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30836958 - March 2022 (42
| comments)
|
| _Demo of the Canon Cat computer released in 1987 with 'leap'
| feature [video]_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29423545
| - Dec 2021 (1 comment)
|
| _Canon Cat_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26213934 -
| Feb 2021 (31 comments)
|
| _Leap Technology (keyboard vs. mouse on a Canon Cat machine, ca
| 1987)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22042900 - Jan 2020
| (1 comment)
|
| _Canon Cat Emulation_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18032916 - Sept 2018 (2
| comments)
|
| _Canon Cat Resources - Jef Raskin 's Forth-Powered Word
| Processing Appliance_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14650365 - June 2017 (23
| comments)
|
| _The Canon Cat_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6978587 -
| Dec 2013 (30 comments)
|
| _Canon Cat Documents Archive_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3394546 - Dec 2011 (8
| comments)
|
| _Canon Cat_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=595744 - May
| 2009 (15 comments)
| dxf wrote:
| I saw Jef Raskin demo the Canon Cat in the 1980s when I was
| working at Stanford.
|
| One of the more interesting concepts behind the interface was,
| everything was stored in one "circular" file, with marks for
| document beginnings and ends. By "circular" I mean that if you
| leapt forward from file to file, you'd eventually return to your
| starting point. The idea was, it's hard to remember the names of
| documents, let alone where in the filesystem you might have saved
| them. But you can usually remember something _about_ the document
| -- some piece of text, etc. Using the leap keys you could quickly
| find the document you were looking for. Modern OSes allow for
| such searching, but at the time the idea of not worrying about
| file locations or names seemed very forward thinking.
|
| Jef had research to show that "leaping" was superior (or at
| least, your productivity was faster) when comapred to other
| computer interfaces -- provided the user was used to using leap
| keys. Later I saw Andy Hertzfeld give a talk on Multifinder, and
| I thought the contrast between the two engineers was stark. The
| Canon Cat gave you one way to interface with the system (which
| was "the best way"), while Andy's interface gave you multiple
| ways to do the same task. Andy said something like "different
| people interact with the system differently" and he wanted to
| support all they ways they might want to do their work.
| II2II wrote:
| > The Cat even allowed you to include computer code in the middle
| of a document that could be executed with a button press.
|
| I miss the 1980's. If I recall correctly, Raskin conceived the
| Macintosh as a computer that was easy to use for ordinary people
| yet also incorporated the means for ordinary people to program
| the machine. The solution was to make it easier to program.
| (Something that was added as an afterthought to Jobs' re-
| envisioned Macintosh with Bill Atkinson's Hypercard.) The general
| view was that those who used computers should be creators, not
| just consumers.
|
| Contrast that to modern computers. While most can be programmed
| by the end user, the entry points are rarely obvious. The vast
| majority of languages that are easy to learn are regarded as
| _learner_ or _toy_ languages. Many of the professional languages
| are several orders of magnitude more difficult to use than their
| equivalents in the 1980 's (often for good reasons, but it
| doesn't help the cause).
| Nition wrote:
| Even going back to Windows 95, there's a lot more visible
| effort made to let basic users become power users than I notice
| today. For example there's a shortcut to Task Scheduler right
| in the taskbar, which takes you to a very simple task
| scheduling interface.
| m463 wrote:
| I'm sorry, my mind though of the cue cat:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
|
| (and the outrage when they were reverse engineered)
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