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A Spiritual Heir to the Macintosh

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A Spiritual Heir to the Macintosh PRODUCT PREVIEW Ezra Shapiro A Spiritual Heir to the Macintosh The Canon Cat may be Jef Raskin's long-sought "information appliance" Editor's note: The following is a BYTE workers at Information Appliance and is the keyboard at a comfortable viewing product preview, It is not a review. We now being manufactured and sold by angle; the screen is slightly to the left of provide an advance look at this new prod­ Canon U.S.A. under a series of technol­ center. A 3'h-inch floppy disk drive is uct because we feel it is significant. ogy licenses. mounted vertically next to the screen in the right-hand section of the integrated he Canon Cat is being ad­ At First Glance housing. vertised as a piece of of­ The 17 -pound Cat takes about as much Outputs include a Centronics parallel fice equipment-the next space as an Apple He with a monitor, port, a 25-pin RS-232C serial port, and step beyond the memory standing 10"/'6 inches tall with a foot­ two Telco RI-Il jacks to connect the typewriter-but there's print 13 Ys inches wide and I Hi inches Cat's internal 30011200-bit -per-second some real computer muscle under this fe­ deep. The CRT display is tilted back from cOllli/wcd line's skin. It's lef Raskin's first machine since he left Apple, where he headed the original Macintosh development team. And, as you might expect from this pedi­ gree, the Cat takes an innovative ap­ proach to computing in the business envi­ ronment. Like the Macintosh, the Cat is a one­ piece unit with a 9-inch black-and-white bit-mapped monitor, a single 3 th-inch floppy disk drive, a small footprint, a Motorola 68000 CPU, and a user inter­ face built into ROM. However, that's where the similarity ends; the Cat has no mouse, no icons, and no graphics. Raskin's goal at Apple had been to create a low-cost, minimalist "people's computer." However, as the Macintosh evolved into a product, it grew in scope, complexity, and cost. A year after his de­ parture from Apple in 1982, Raskin founded a small company and began to design a machine that would recapture his original vision; he named the firm In­ formation Appliance, a rather succinct statement of his utilitarian philosophy. The company is still going strong. The Canon Cat is a refinement of the proto­ types developed by Raskin and his co- Ezra Shapiro is a consulting editor for BYTE. Contact him at P.O. Box 146069, San Francisco, CA 94114. Because oflhe \'olume of mail he receives, Ezra, regrel­ fUlly. cannot respond to each inquiry. Photo by Paul Avis OCTOBER 1987 • BY T E 121 “R ki D 006 2 PICT” 750 KB 2000 02 21 d i 600h 600 i 4228h 6197 CANON CAT can sit down at the keyboard and JUs: start distances with any precision. typing. Initial defaults are set for a stan­ Aborting a Leap operation is as easy as Canon Cat dard business page, so a novice can begin adding a few nonsense characters to the producing letters and memos almost search string; the Cat won't be able to Company immediately _ find it, and you'll be back where you Canon USA Inc The Cat's full -size keyboard is almost started. Raskin suggests slapping your One Canon Plaza identical to those of the IBM Selectric hand lightly in the center of the keyboard, Lake Success, NY 11042-9979 (51 5) 688- 7000 typewriter and its competitors, Although an action likely to produce the required several new keys have been added to the gibberish. Size layout, the business typist will notice no The Leap keys are also used to high­ 10"/'6 by 13'Ia by 17'/4 ,nches: anomalies. The period and comma keys , light text. You can delete, copy, or move 17 pounds for example, generate those characters in highlighted blocks or check them for either shifted or unshifted mode, spelling mistakes with the built-in dictio­ Components While the tops of the key caps adhere nary. If a highlighted block happens to be Processor: 68000 running at 5 MHz to the office standard, computer com­ a mathematical formula, one keystroke Memory: 256K bytes mands are printed on the front fa ce of calculates the result. The answer appears Mass storage: One 256K -byte Internal 3V2 -inch floppy disk drive many of the keys. The L key is marked on the screen with a dotted underline; Display: 9-inch black-and-white built-in Disk, the J key is marked Print, and so highlighting it and hitting a command se­ bit-mapped screen on. You trigger these special functions quence reveals the original formula, Keyboard: Compatible with IBM the same way you use Control-key combi­ which you can then edit and recompute. Selectric typewriter plus control functions nations on a computer keyboard . How­ If the highlighted text is a computer on front of key caps ever, the Cat's Control key is labeled program written in either Forth or 68000 1/0 interfaces: One Centronics simply Use Front- meaning use the com­ assembly language, the Cat executes it. parallel port, one RS-232C serial (OB-25) mand that is printed on the front of the You can use a highlighted columnar table port , and two RJ -11 Jacks (one to key cap. as the raw data for a fuji mail merge. external telephone. one to telephone line) So, for example, to access the context­ Since you can assign sequences of com­ Modem: In te rnal 300/1200 bps sensitive help screens (48K bytes' mands mixed with text to each of the nu­ Software worth), you press the Use Front key to­ meric keys at the top of the keyboard (ac­ Contained In ROM. it Includes word gether with the N key, which says Explain cessed with the Use Front key), you can processing. mail merge, calculalion, on the front of its key cap. A Setup com­ create complex macros or store boiler­ communlcalions, data retrieval, and mand-the 'A / Y2 key-lets you change plate text. programming In Forth or assembly system parameters like margins, printer One keystroke also dials a highlighted language types, character set, and so on. An Undo telephone number either for voice com­ command lets you reverse your last munications or to initiate a session with a Price action , remote computer; ASCII data simply $1495 The display looks as much like a type­ flows into RAM as a long text document, writer with a sheet of paper as you can get which you can then manipulate as you on a CRT screen. Black characters on a would any other text. The incoming data white background extend upward from a stream is buffered in RAM, so if it white-an-black ruler bar at the bottom of doesn't require constant attention, you the display. Margins are indicated with a can move to another document and con­ hollow box superimposed on the ruler tinue working. bar; the effect is similar to a typewriter's paper bail. Small symbols below the Documents and Disks modem to an incoming telephone line and ruler show line spacing, justification, The Cat environment is essentially one an external telephone_ The modem uses memory usage, and so on. long text stream broken into pages. The the Hayes command set and can be con­ The Cat holds 160K bytes in RAM, software automatically inserts page figured either for regular ASCII commu­ which is roughly equivalent to 80 single­ breaks, but you can force a new page or nications (including auto-answer) or as a spaced typewritten pages. You move start a new document whenever you want simple telephone dialer, through your data by holding down one of to. Forcing a document break resets a The machine's motherboard, boasting two extra keys located in front of the page-number counter to zero. Indepen­ a 5-megahertz 68000 and 256K bytes of spacebar and typing a string of charac­ dent files do not exist per se, but if you dynamic RAM, lies flat underneath the ters; the Cat jumps to the next occurrence don't want to use Leap searches to locate display _ Software for the Cat is built into of that string. The right-hand key initiates a specific document, the Cat lets you as­ 256K bytes of ROM, with an additional forward searches; the left-hand key, sign a title to any region started with a l28K bytes that contains the system's backward searches, If the search string forced document break. built-in spelling checker, a 9O,OOO-word doesn't find a match, the cursor returns The machine uses a 256K-byte disk version of The American Heritage Dictio­ to your starting position. In Cat jargon, format, which holds the entire contents of nary_ Setup parameters and a small per­ these two keys are called Leap keys. the Cat's RAM plus configuration pa­ sonal dictionary are stored in 8K bytes of Raskin claims that scrolling from the rameters, personal additions to the dictio­ CMOS RAM, backed up with a lithium top to the bottom of a fu1l8Y2- by II-inch nary, system information, and a bit map battery , page takes 8 seconds if you're pressing a of the last screen saved to disk. cursor key, 4 seconds if you're using a There are several advantages to this Putting the Cat to Work mouse and scroll bars, and only 2 sec­ system.
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