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Refurb Weekend: Canon Cat
It's the Memorial Day holiday weekend and it's time for a little deferred maintenance, especially on those machines I intend to work on more...
There was also an infamous story where Canon engineers added a hard power switch not present in the original prototype, believing its absence to be an oversight — over Raskin's objections, who intended the machine as an always-on, instantly useable system. The Cat nevertheless launched at an MSRP of $1495 ($4125 in 2024 dollars) in July that year to many plaudits and design awards, but alleged corporate shenanigans and uncertainty within Canon doomed it internally, causing them to dropkick the product after just six months and 20,000 sales. Although the default mode is the built-in word processor, its tForth ("token-threaded Forth") dialect was easily unlockable and Information Appliance, Inc., Raskin's company that produced the Cat and licensed it to Canon, published substantial documentation on how to enable and program in it.
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