aamoviebb
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 11 months, 2014–2026
17:34 · 25K views · Apr 23, 2011
A promotional video for Leap, the navigation technology invented by Jef Raskin, demonstrated on the Canon Cat computer around 1987. It shows keyboard-driven search and cursor positioning in place of a mouse.
HN uses it as the visual reference for Leap keys and Raskin's interface ideas whenever jump-to-text navigation or command palettes come up.
12 comments from Hacker News
More on the Canon Cat: [LINK] [LINK] There are also a few previous HN discussions on this machine. EDIT: I just have to post this lovely scene from the original video separately. This is about human-computer interaction after all, isn't it! this video Aren't we actually approaching an age where this kind of (almost-)single-purpose machines might be making a comeback? The focus this model seems to allow or enforce on the user feels kind of... healthy.
I had read a lot about the Cat, but never saw it in action, so I decided to look for a video. This is a fascinating view into Raskin's user interface concepts. The world might have been a very different place if Jobs hadn't interfered with the Macintosh project. this video
Meh. the Lisa was absolutely, positively, explicitly NOT a Mac. If you don't get that, then you misunderstand the business of computing in the late 70s / early 80s. The author also ignored Jef Raskin's work on the original Mac project (I wrote a serial driver for him in the early 80s for a 6809 prototype he was working on.) If you're going to make one of these Mac hagiographies, it's useful to point out the Canon Cat (which was more in line with Jef's original idea for the Mac) and then point out how different it was from main-stream Macs. And then point out WHY the Lisa was not a Mac. So... Why do people think the Lisa was a prototype Mac? It's easy to understand the confusion. It has a 68k processor, a mouse and a bitmap screen. It was even used as a development platform for the original Macs. But it is not a Mac. The Lisa didn't have "apps" and "files" in the same way we think about them. It had "tools" and "documents." The Lisa was strongly influenced by the Xerox Star. And while it's not exactly true to say the Lisa was Apple's version of the Star, there was definitely a strong resemblance. The Lisa (and the Star) came with all the functionality it would ever have built into the system. (This restriction changed later, but when launched, it was considered a complete system.) It had "apps" in the sense there were tool icons you could (double?) click to create a blank document of a specific type. But it took Apple over a year to decide they wanted to give third-parties the
I don't know anything about the Swyft card, but I know something about the Cat (not much). The Swyft card implemented at least the cursor positioning stuff in this video: this video Some things about the Cat that aren't in that video are interesting. The whole thing was a single-user (fine by me), single-process (fine for the time) and single-program system. When you turn it off it writes its whole memory (incl. framebuffer) out to disk, which I think is the only thing on the disk actually, and when you turn it on it reads it back in to memory. So it never had any concept of a file, of saving a file, or opening a file. Saving a document was just saving your state, which includes the document, and opening a document was leaping to that part of the screen. You could migrate your session by just carrying the disk with you. The tabulating and (re)calculating thing is slick, and I think the Swyft might have provided that feature too. If someone could figure out a way to reconcile that with the Unix notion that different programs, running in different processes, must do different things, I would be so happy.
If you press and release the LEAP key, it advances the cursor one character forward (or backwards if you hit the left leap key.) If you press down (but do not release) the LEAP key you enter a search semi-mode. As you type a search term in this semi-mode, the cursor moves to the first instance of that search term it finds. After moving to the first instance of the search term, you release the leap key to exit the search semi-mode. If you want to move the cursor to a subsequent instance of the search term, you press (and do not release) the "USE FRONT" key and press the leap key again (whose key front is labeled "Leap Again.") You can see this in action in this YouTube video, but it happens pretty fast so you have to watch carefully: this video