Your very own humane interface: Try Jef Raskin’s ideas at home

In our earlier article about Macintosh project creator Jef Raskin, we looked at his quest for the humane computer, one that was efficient, consistent, useful, and above all else, respectful and adaptable to the natural frailties of humans. From Raskin's early work on the Apple Macintosh to the Canon Cat and later his unique software implementations, you were guaranteed an interface you could sit down and interact with nearly instantly and—once you'd learned some basic keystrokes and rules—one you could be rapidly productive with.

But no modern computer implements his designs directly, even though some are based on principles he either espoused or outright pioneered. Fortunately, with a little work and the magic of emulation, you can have your very own humane interface at home and see for yourself what computing might have been had we traveled a little further down Raskin's UI road.

You don’t need to feed a virtual Cat

Perhaps the most straightforward of Raskin's systems to emulate is the Canon Cat. Sold by Canon as an overgrown word processor (billed as a “work processor”), it purported to be a simple editor for office work but is actually a full Motorola 68000-based computer programmable through an intentional backdoor in its own dialect of Forth. It uses a single workspace saved en masse to floppy disk that can be subdivided into multiple “documents” and jumped to quickly with key combinations, and it includes facilities for simple spreadsheets and lists.

The Cat is certainly Jef Raskin's most famous system after the early Macintosh, and it's most notable for its exclusive use of the keyboard for interaction—there is no mouse or pointing device of any kind. It is supported by MAME, the well-known multi-system emulator, using ROMs available from the Internet Archive.

Note that the MAME driver for the Canon Cat is presently incomplete; it doesn't support a floppy drive or floppy disk images, and it doesn't support the machine's built-in serial port. Still, this is more than enough to get the flavor of how it operates, and the Internet Archive manual includes copious documentation.