A Jef Raskin followup project to the Canon Cat is Archy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy Fascinating UI concept: largely search-based, with everything persistent (no saving), infinite non-windowing work area, and many other interesting features.
Everyone should read Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface. He expresses many of his interface ideas used with the Canon Cat and Archy in the book. I now consider thoughtful interface design a moral decision.
> Every action should be undoable, even after a document or application has been closed and reopened.
At first, this sounded ridiculous. Undo after a save? But then I realized I do that now & then myself, using a version control system. So here I am editing a DVCS-managed document. Pre-save undo is handled by the editor, while post-save undo is handled by the DVCS (which is nice, but I usually have to look up how to do it).
All this underscores what crappy interfaces we really have, and how we get used to them, and so overlook their serious flaws.
Jef doesn't think you should have to save. It should be automatic. I've been thinking about a system that version controlled a file after every keystroke. It would be a little heavy but, consider that you could undo anything forever.
I've actually known about (and used) Archy long before I knew about its predecessor... It's surprising how obscure the Cat is, considering Raskin's renown.
Raskin's book, The Humane Interface, is basically what kicked me over into UX from development.
The Canon Cat is absolutely fascinating, and I got to study one for a research project in college.
Archy never really got traction. Creating a text editor from scratch in Python wasn't the way to go; starting with something like Gecko and contentEditable would have gotten them somewhere -- anywhere -- faster.
Jef Raskin passed away shortly before my college research project, very sad, but the project was to extrapolate from the proposals in The Humane Interface and examine if they still applied today. The big issue is that Raskin, THE and the Cat only explored text editing in any level of detail. You can imagine how the ideas could apply to any sort of process on the PC, from system management (Time Machine) to video editing (non-linear) to web browsing (Ubiquity), but none of his published work discusses it (except for maybe his QuickDraw thesis, which I read so long as as to have forgotten it in its entirety), so you're entirely on your own to envision what it might have looked and worked like.
He was also a big fan of zooming UIs which I am, to this day, not sold on (but Oberon looked neat, I'll have to check it out).
Speaking of Ubiquity, Raskin's work lives on through his son, Aza, who formerly ran Humanized (I still run Enso on my Windows PC), and now runs Mozilla Labs.
Emulating a Canon Cat would be neat. Putting a real Canon Cat online would be hard without the special keys. It wouldn't be inconceivable to put an Apple IIe online, and plug in a SwyftCard: essentially a basic Canon Cat expansion card for the Apple IIe. There have been some efforts to get a copy of SwyftWare, the software version of this (I've even emailed Aza asking if he had a copy) and try to get it running in an emulator, but no-one's had any luck in the few years I've been watching people try (I own an Apple IIe with a SwyftCard).
I flagged it because the submission contains no content. It's just a link to a random(?) wikipedia page. The page was last modified in November 2008. The device was released in 1987.
You do know what the N in HN stands for?
Seriously, are we gonna submit half of wikipedia now?
I'm sure the pages for Newton, Apple II, Atari, Amiga and other vintage hardware are no less relevant than this.
