It was thus said that the Great Chris Halarewich once stated:
>
> at the local salvation army today came across a computer/wordprosser
> unit made by Cannon called the Cannon Cat any info on this would be most
> grateful
Jef Raskin was at Apple Computers in the late 70s, early 80s and was
working on an information appliance called the Macintosh [1] when Steve Jobs
came in and took the project over [2]. Jef left shortly thereafter when it
became apparent his original design was being discarded. He tried making an
information appliance on his own (based on the Apple ][, with some special
hardware) but that didn't go anywhere (Swyft machine). He then ended up in
Cannon where he finally made the machine he wanted to---the Cannon Cat.
There's not much out there, but the machine itself seems pretty neat.
Here are a (the?) few sites that have anything at all about the machine:
http://www.spies.com/~aek/orphanage.html
http://www.regnirps.com/SEF/oddities.htm
http://www.landsnail.com/apple/local/cat.html
http://www.regnirps.com/resume.htm
http://www.jefraskin.com/curriculum_vitae.html
http://www.argyle-design.com/html/portfolio_html/products/swift.html
http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi22KeyboardVMouse2.html
Jef Raskin's own site is at
http://www.jefraskin.com/ . He has some very
interesting ideas about UIs and I find his work facinating, although the
average geek seem to miss his point (in the last year there have been two
articles on Slashdot (
http://slashdot.org/) about Jef Raskin and the general
population there hasn't been kind to Jef).
-spc (Would love to play around with a Cannon Cat ... )
[1] The original Macintosh was a text and keyboard computer based
originally around the 6809. Jef Raskin was never a fan of GUIs
(and he particularly hates mice).
[2] I believe that upper management at Apple were tired of Steve Jobs
and wanted him to go away really. They either gave him the
Macintosh project to keep him away from the day to day operations,
or they kept him away from the day to day operations and he glommed
into the Macintosh project as something to do.
Received on Tue May 22 2001 - 18:51:53 BST