| Image: Canon (via CanonCat.net) |
Most DPReview readers will know Canon from its photographic equipment, such as cameras, lenses, printers, and inks. Some may even know that it's an important player in lithography, making the machines that help make computer chips. But you'd have to have a pretty good memory (or be a frequent watcher of my former employer The Verge's Version History podcast) to know that the company once made and sold computers, including one that was designed by a key member of the original team that built the Apple Macintosh.
That computer is called the Canon Cat, and its creation was led by Jef Raskin. It debuted in 1987, according to The A Register, and Canon sold it not as a word processor, electronic typewriter or even personal computer. Instead, the company called it a "Work Processor": a machine to "help you write and edit, communicate and calculate."
| You don't buy something called the Cat to use a mouse. Image: Canon (via CanonCat.net) |
Despite the Macintosh lineage*, the Cat didn't adopt what was arguably one of that computer's defining features: a mouse for navigating the UI, an omission that was actually touted in the marketing materials (which have thankfully been preserved on CanonCat.net). Nor did it have arrow keys. Instead, you navigated using the keyboard, which had various secondary functions attached to its standard letter keys. The core navigation feature, though, was the Leap system.
The Leap system used two keys under the spacebar. If you pressed Leap, then started typing, your cursor would jump to whatever word matched what you had just entered. So, for example, if I pressed Leap and entered "Ver", it would jump back to the first paragraph to select "Verge," and from there I could make whatever changes I wanted. The buttons also had a secondary function that let you cycle forward and back through your text to jump between multiple instances of what you typed.
The Cat had some other cool ideas too, largely designed to make it simple to use without much training, in a time when a lot of people wouldn't have that much experience with a computer. For the most part, the main program you interacted with acted just like a stack of paper, letting you break the pages up into separate documents however you saw fit. But documents didn't just have to be text; you could also create spreadsheets alongside your text, which could automatically run calculations (which, again, you controlled using the Leap system).
The Cat could also sort text, run a spell check, print documents and even control your phone. It was, however, a much more basic machine than something like the Macintosh, with its programs like MacPaint, PageMaker and, just three years after the Cat was introduced, Photoshop. You would hope the Apple computer could do more, though, given that the Cat retailed for $1495 (around $4300 today), while its contemporary, the Macintosh II, started at $3769 (a whopping $10,842 after inflation).
The Cat was an appliance computer; a machine that ran a handful of included programs, rather than one that let you run arbitrary applications. |
Ultimately, though, it was the Macintosh's idea of computing that won out, rather than the Cat's**. While text-editing pros can jump around their documents just as fast as the Leap system allowed, that style of editing didn't end up becoming the norm for most office workers. But the Cat is a reminder of a time when the future of computing was up for debate, and when companies were taking big swings to come up with the way we would all interact with the machines that were fast becoming a part of daily life.
It's also a reminder of when Canon made computers for personal use and office workers, a business it's been out of for quite a while. That's probably okay, though; it's doing pretty well at selling cameras.
If you want to learn more about The Cat, CanonCat.net has an archive of much of its marketing material and documentation, including reference guides and contemporary articles. Archive.org has an emulator of the Cat's operating system, which lets you get a feel for how the Leap system works (the Option or Alt keys act as the Leap keys). There's also a 6-minute video on YouTube demoing a working Canon Cat.
* - While Jef Raskin helped pioneer the Macintosh and a lot of the ideas it introduced, other members of the Macintosh team say the concept changed quite substantially from his original vision after Steve Jobs took the project over. It's controversial whether he was a fan of what the mouse ended up being.
** I'm sure there's some particular text editor for Linux that works more like the Cat that people are leaping to the comments to tell me about, but most people use a mouse or, these days, a touchscreen.