The Canon Cat was an innovative, small, task-dedicated computer released in 1987. The Cat, on the surface, was not unlike the dedicated word processors that were popular in the 1980s. The Cat, unlike most word processors, was far more powerful and incorporated many unique ideas for data manipulation. The Cat was primarily the brainchild of Jef Raskin, one of the first designers on the Macintosh project at Apple in 1979.
The Cat featured an innovative text-based user interface that did not make use of either a mouse, icons, or graphics. All data was seen as a long "stream" of text broken into several pages. Instead of using a traditional command line interface or menu commands, the Cat made use of its specially designed keyboard, which had keys that were used to activate different commands depending on what particular mode the user was in. The Cat also used special "leap keys" and by typing strings of characters, the user could navigate to the next occurrence of a particular character string.
The Canon Cat hardware consisted of a 9-inch black-and-white bitmapped monitor, a single 3.5-inch 256K floppy disk drive, and a keyboard. It used a Motorola 68000 microprocessor running at 5 MHz, had 256K of RAM, and had both a parallel port, one RS-232C serial port (DB-25 connector), two RJ-11 jacks (for telephone connections), and an internal 1200 baud modem.
The Canon Cat was one of the earliest "information appliances" but its demise was likely due to poor marketing on Canon U.S.A.'s part.
It also had the misfortune of being launched at a time when the great wave of word processing software packages for personal computers was eradicaing the existing installed base of dedicated word processors. It was mistaken for an old-style word processor instead of being seen as a precursor to a new way of handling information, for all.
