Canon Cat
Jef Raskin’s 1987 writing machine, and where LEAP comes from.
Jef Raskin started the Macintosh project at Apple, lost it to Steve Jobs, left, and spent the next several years building the computer he’d actually wanted. The Cat is that computer. Canon shipped it in July 1987 at $1,495, sold around twenty thousand, and killed it after six months. Raskin blamed the marketing.
It has no mouse, no arrow keys, no icons, no windows, and no files. Your work is one continuous stream of text broken into pages. Saving is a two-key chord that writes all 256 KB of memory to a floppy, and switching the machine back on restores that memory, so you resume mid-sentence. There is no “open.” There is nothing to name.
LEAP
Two keys sit under the space bar. Hold the right one and start typing, and the cursor jumps to the next occurrence of what you’ve typed so far, refining with every character. Let go and you’re there. Hold the left one to go backward instead.
That’s the whole idea, and I have never found a better answer to “where was that paragraph,” though I concede I stopped looking once I found this one. You already know the words. Getting to them shouldn’t cost you a dialog box, a scrollbar, or your hands leaving the home row.
The same two keys do more than jump.
- Creep — tap a LEAP key without typing and the cursor moves one character that way.
- Select — press both keys and everything between the cursor and where you last leapt from is highlighted.
- Leap again — walk to the next occurrence without retyping the pattern.
- Carry — leap with text highlighted and the text travels with the cursor.
Creep is the tell. It’s what a machine does when it has no arrow keys and needs one anyway. LEAP wasn’t a convenience bolted onto a text editor. It was how you moved, and everything else bent around it.