A Spiritual Heir to the Macintosh

by Ezra Shapiro

from the October 1987 issue of Byte

The Canon Cat may be Jef Raskin’s long-sought “information appliance”

Editor’s note: The following is a BYTE product preview. It is not a review. We provide an advance look at this new product because we feel it is significant.

The Canon Cat is being advertised as a piece of office equipment-the next step beyond the memory typewriter-but there’s some real computer muscle under this feline’s skin. It’s JefRaskin’s first machine since he left Apple, where he headed the original Macintosh development team., And, as you might expect from this pedigree, the Cat takes an innovative approach to computing in the business environment.

from the November 1985 issue of MicroTimes magazine

Jef Raskin believes that computers should be easy to use. How easy? Well, he calls his company Information Appliance, and favors computers as hassle-free as toasters.

By contrast, Raskin says, the current state of the industry more closely resembles a scenario conjured up by Douglas Adams (of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy fame). “Adams was describing some imaginary product of the future, and he said that people get such a sense of achievement from having mastered it that they forget how useless it is. I think that’s really a key problem in the industry today — a person works on the computer and they get all this mastery, and they just forget all the little gut-wrenching annoyances they went through when they used it first.”