Recreating the Canon Cat document interface

Summary

My work is supported by members. If you find my work valuable and have the means, consider supporting it with a membership or sponsorship! This members-only article has been made publicly available. You can see more of my work at alexanderobenauer.com. The last chapter of Bootstrapping Computing is all about user environments. One of the more unique user environments mentioned is found on the Canon Cat, an obscure machine that didn’t last long on the market, but took some specific philosophies to an extreme, presenting fascinating implications for how users might interact with their personal computers. The Cat’s user environment was one long text stream. There are some caveats to this next statement, but basically: that’s it! There was no mouse, only a keyboard. In fact, the Cat did away with WIMP entirely — there were no windows, no icons, no menus, and no pointer. There was no file hierarchy and no need to name things. None of your text was automatically timestamped. It was just you, a keyboard, and one long text stream with everything you’ve done in it. For navigation, the Cat featured leap keys: two rose-colored keys below the spacebar. ⊕ You could press and hold one while typing a sequence of characters to “teleport” to the nearest instance of that pattern. The left leap key would take you back, the right leap key would take you forward. User conventions emerged to support life within this system. Users would implement their own navigational systems using special characters, tags, “@keywords”, and consistent date and timestamp formats that would work well with the leap keys. That’s what caught my eye first: your environment effectively becomes a system of your own design, over time. With a small set of commands and a simple data model, many of the features in users’ systems were actually personal conventions that made good use of the of the available actions. It’s an interesting form of personal software: your conventions compound and evolve to make the system ...