new additions, info wanted

From: George Currie <g_at_kurico.com>
Date: Mon Jun 22 22:43:18 1998

> >More fun stuff picked up this weekend:
> >
> >Canon Cat - A glorified word processor that was created by one of the
> original
> >members of the Macintosh team.
>
> You really don't want a Canon Cat. Honest. Tell ya what I'm gonna do.
> You send it to me (heck, I'll even chip in for shipping) and I'll send you
> a real nice computer. Yeah, that's it. Send it to me. Bad mojo you
> don't want it. Trust me.
>
> 8^)
>
> Yep, Jef Raskin designed the Cat after coming up with the Mac; Apparently
> rather revolutionary in terms of being able to get around and do stuff
> with special keys. Dunno too much, but I'd sure like to learn. (And if
> you tell me you have a FlatCat, I'll be visiting in the middle of the
> night... 8^)

I'll trade it for an Altair and an Apple 1 and most importantly, one of those rare
black AppleIIplus's.

What the heck is a FlatCat (uh oh, me thinks I just set myself up here).

It'd be nice to find out what printers worked with it (I hear that Canon shipped a
Diablo daisy wheel with it, I'll have to scrounge through the garage one of these
days, I think I have one sitting around).

It doesn't have cursor keys, or a pointing device. It uses these two 'leap' keys
at the botton/center of the keyboard (just below the space bar). You hold one
of the keys down and type the text you want to jump to. You could also jump
(leap) paragraphs or even whole documents. Kinda funky. My wife seemed to
pick it up pretty quickly (she thinks it all so cute with the word "cat" written in
fancy letters on the keyboard). The "OS" and "BIOS" are written in Forth and
apparently there is a way to access the Forth environment. It also saves/loads
the entire machine state to floppy (versus saving individual files).

Like I said, a funky little machine. Too bad that it'll be boxed and not seen for
several months (gonna be moving soon, hopefully this apartment hopping will
end soon, too dang many computers to move!).

Let me know when you get the Apple 1 and I'll dig the Cat out and send it to
you :)

George
Received on Mon Jun 22 1998 - 22:43:18 BST