Pretty pictures, bootable floppy disks, and the first Canon Cat demo?

About a month ago, Cameron Kaiser first introduced us to the Canon Cat, a computer designed by Jeff Raskin, but abandoned within six months by Canon, who had no idea what to do with it. In his second article on the Cat, Kaiser dives much deeper into the software and operating system of the Cat, even going so far as to become the first person to write software for it. One of the most surprising aspects of the Cat is that it's collaborative; other users can call into your Cat using a landline and edit the same document you're working on remotely.

Selecting text has other functions too. When I say everything goes in the workspace, I do mean everything. The Cat is designed to be collabourative: you can hook up your Cat to a phone line, or at least you could when landlines were more ubiquitous, and someone could call in and literally type into your document remotely. If you dialed up a service, you would type into the document and mark and send text to the remote system, and the remote system's response would also become part of your document. (That goes for the RS-232 port as well, by the way. In fact, we'll deliberately exploit this capability for the projects in this article.)

Cameron Kaiser

You can also do calculations right into the text, going so far as allowing the user to define variables and reuse those variables throughout the text to perform various equations and other mathematic operations. If you go back and change the value of a variable, all other equations using those variables are updated as well. That's quite nifty, especially considering the age of the Cat, and since the Cat is fixed width, you can effectively create spreadsheets this way, too.

There's really far too much to cover here, and I strongly suggest you head on over and read the entire thing.