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

Now that our 1987 Canon Cat is refurbished and ready to go another nine innings or so, it's time to get into the operating system and pull some tricks.

As you'll recall from our historical discussion of the Canon Cat, the Cat was designed by Jef Raskin as a sophisticated user-centric computer but demoted to office machine within Canon's typewriter division, which was tasked with selling it. Because Canon only ever billed the Cat as a "work processor" for documents and communications, and then abruptly tanked it after just six months, it never had any software packages that were commercially produced. In fact, I can't find any software written for it other than the original Tutor and Demo diskettes included with the system and a couple of Canon-specific utilities, which I don't have and don't seem to be imaged anywhere.

So this entry will cover a lot of ground: first, we have to be able to reliably read, image and write Canon disks on another system, then decipher the format, and then patch those images to display pictures and automatically run arbitrary code. At the end we'll have three examples we can image on any PC 3.5" floppy drive and insert into a Cat, turn it on or hit DISK, and have the Cat automatically run: a Jef Raskin "picture disk," a simple but useful dummy terminal, and the world's first (I believe) Canon Cat, two-disk, slightly animated and finely dithered, slideshow graphics demo!

But before we get to pumping out floppy disks, we first need to talk about how one uses a Cat. And that means we need to talk a bit about Forth, the Canon Cat's native tongue. And that means we should probably talk more about the operating system too. Oh, and we should go down to CompUSA and buy a brand new floppy drive while we're at it.

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 in the near future. So we'll start with one that's widely considered to be a remarkable cul-de-sac in computing history: the Canon Cat.

Many people take a casual glance at this machine and say, "Isn't that an overgrown word processor?" And one could certainly think so, in part because of its keyboard-centric operation, but mostly from the utterly uncomprehending way Canon advertised it in 1987. Canon dubbed the Cat a "work processor" because of its built-in telecommunications, modem and word processor even though Jef Raskin, its designer, had intended it as a "people's computer" that could be inexpensive, accessible and fully functional — all things he had hoped to accomplish at Apple after first launching the Macintosh project, prior to departing in 1982.

Canon, however, never fully grasped the concept either. Apart from the tone-deaf marketing, Canon sold the device through their typewriter division and required the display to only show what a daisywheel printer could generate, limiting its potential as a general purpose workstation. 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. In the wake of the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash Raskin's investors subsequently pulled the plug and the company closed in 1991.

But what was actually under the hood was a unique all-in-one 68000 machine with a bitmapped display and a full Forth environment hidden in its ROM-based, fast-start operating system. There's no hard disk, just a single 3.5" floppy drive to save your documents and the current Forth dictionary. 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.

We'll have more to say about that in a future entry when we get into the guts of the OS. Today, we have two tasks: replace its settings battery and shore up the nearly unobtainium custom Canon floppy drive, its most common point of failure. It's time for a Refurb Weekend.