I worked for a company in New Jersey that was a Canon dealership, so primarily sold copiers and fax machines. They were getting into computers as they became a thing - and the Cat came out in that weird space between dedicated commercial word processors (like Wang), 'digital' typewreiters (ones that had basically a line of editable text in them, and full blown computers. The Cat never caught on for a couple important reasons. It was very expensive (wikipedia says US$1,495 (equivalent to $3,570 in 2021)). It had a UI that tried desperately to be 'user friendly' but was too weird for most folks. The mac (and other projects) had established that the mouse was the way to work with screen elements. The Cat did not have one, but used a weird set of specialized keys for navigation. Lastly, because it was 100% custom, making it work with other printers, devices, etc was very difficult. In the end, no one wanted to spend $3500 (equiv) on a machine that was an island unto itself. Canon tried desperately to get into the computer market, with a whole series of machines that had some really beautiful designs and interesting approaches (see https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=591 ) but in the end, they made 99% of their money on the Canon CX engine - a machine that proved to be a killer workhorse - and leveraged Canon's excellence in copiers to make a rock solid platform that drove the Laserwriter and the Imagewriter printers. Maybe someone can help - Canon was pushing a mouse-less desktop publishing program for a while. It had a really strange interface, but worked pretty well. This was just as Aldus Pagemaker was coming onto the scene. In fact, a story I heard was at some big Canon conference, some bright salesman stood up and said "HANDS SHOULD STAY ON THE KEYBOARD WHERE THEY BELONG!" and got applause. Yeah, that didn't work well. But I can't remember the name of the software. Anyone know? This would have been, oh, 1984 ish? On Fri, Oct 21, 2022 at 11:12 AM Andrew Diller via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Yep, I donated my two Cats to VCF- after trying to use them for a few months.
Totally insane UI (and I hesitate to call it an _interface_). It's a good description to just call it a 'word processing computer that can't print (supports just like 3 specific models) and has bizarre keyboard chords to do anything.'
The article does a good job explaining the backstory but you can't comprehend how impossible the Cat is to actually use unless you sit down and try to do something a 5th grader can do on a Mac- like type and print a simple note. Also forget about networking.
Maybe VCF will get that Cat out on display at the museum at some point so visitors could see for themselves!
-andy
On Oct 21, 2022, at 9:33 AM, Christian Liendo via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
This is a new article about the Canon Cat and I know there are people who would be interested in this article and may have opinions
https://reproof.app/blog/on-designing-a-more-humane-computer
-- Dave Shevett shevett@pobox.com