Flashback #tech
The Old VCR blog – it's short for Old Vintage Computing Research – is recommended reading, and one latest post features a deep dive into one of the most important, radical, and revolutionary – not to mention little-known – computers ever invented: the Canon Cat.
https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2024/05/refurb-weekend-canon-cat.html
The Cat was designed by the late great Jef Raskin, and there's a theory that he named it because cats famously chase mice… and he didn't like the mouse-centric computer that Steve Jobs turned the Macintosh into - Its software was implemented in the legendarily efficient Forth language
http://ratfactor.com/forth/the_programming_language_that_writes_itself.html
(as also used in the far less radical Jupiter Ace home computer),
https://www.theregister.com/2012/09/21/jupiter_cantab_jupiter_ace_is_30_years_old
and was designed to be extensible
if it had thrived and grown, owners could have purchased new functionality which would add new abilities to its single, all-encompassing onboard software
the Canon Cat and the Mac that Steve Jobs killed.
https://www.reproof.app/blog/on-designing-a-more-humane-computer
Part of the original idea was that it wouldn't even have a power button: as he noted, appliances such as toasters or landline telephones don't need power switches - it's hard to imagine how radical the device was back then. Raskin wanted to eliminate many of the ideas, inherited from 1970s-era, text-based computers, which dominated computing then and in many ways still do.
https://youtu.be/o_TlE_U_X3c