Episode 98 - The Canon Cat

This time we are looking at a somewhat obscure machine: the Canon Cat. Designed by Jef Raskin, the Cat is sometimes called the spiritual successor to the Macintosh. That's a nice little epitaph, but doesn't fully explain the tangled mess of things between Raskin, Jobs, Apple, and the Mac. Today we will try to untangle some of that mess as we examine a fascinating little computer that could have changed the world.

Selected Sources:

www.canoncat.net/ -- Everything about the Cat

archive.org/de... -- Raskin's Macintosh memos

www.digibarn.c... -- Computers by the Millions

[@CARLiCON]

just an fyi, adding a 5.25" floppy drive(s) to an Apple II was not difficult & you did not have to use Apple branded floppy drives. Once you tried a floppy, you'd never go back to tapes. This was before IDE, that's why you had to add the expansion board. The hard part was that this was before HDs, so the Apple 2 only had no OS, & RAM & tape ONLY for storage, so you had to boot DOS into RAM from disk first, then swap disks to load the program. The solution was to have dual drives, that way you could leave the DOS boot disk in A: drive & it would boot automatically into DOS on power up. Then just load the program from the B: drive.

[@eldersprig]

Xerox invented the PC *several* times.
Jobs swiped GUI idea but not the Smalltalk/oop dynamic self referential part.

[@drmarioschannel]

This computer seems like a step back from the Mac 128k?