Cat and mouse

So they’re everywhere. Mice, that is, but I use a form of active ignorance to avoid thinking about it. This works well until around this time of year when a mouse poops directly on my kitchen counter. Then I fall back, like the clock, and try to magically think the cardinality of the set of such mice. I speak loudly so that no sleeping rodent could misunderstand my views about the mouse and what must be done to get rid of that lone and unwelcome guest. I think the mice have a good laugh about this every year. This turns to gallows humor that we share every time I catch the mouse in a trap. I prefer to think about something else.

So they’re everywhere. Computers, that is, but we use a form of active ignorance to avoid thinking about it. It’s easy! We just call them something else, like Smart TV or cash register or ereader. At the airport recently, I was reminded that all my large electronics needed to go in bins by themselves. When TSA merges with the Fish and Wildlife service, I think there is a chance that small electronics will simply be thrown back into the water until they mature so that we’re not constantly over harvesting.

Jef Raskin’s Cat computer is the answer I need today to distract myself from mice. It may just be what I need in my life generally. Jef famously championed the original Macintosh, or prophesied it, or coined the name that was ultimately slapped on a completely different computer depending of who you ask. He’s famous for it, anyway.

Jef was frustrated by the downright flexibility of computers at the time and craved a box that once programmed would stay programmed. An appliance for information. So Jeff formed Information Appliance and then discovered the hard way that appliances is a rough business. Not in the Thomas Edison discovered-99-ways-to-not-make-an-appliance-before-succeeding way. More of a one and done.

But that one… One of the things that Raskin famously hated was mice. Needless distractions that took your hands away from the keyboard. And so he’s famous for creating the Mac, which introduced millions to the mouse, because that’s how the goddess Pheme works when annoyed.

After that experience, Jef licensed his idea for an appliance that is secretly a computer to Canon. Canon is famous for not making computers. Printers, cameras, photocopiers, projectors but not … oh. Actually Canon did make some computers. Well that makes sense.

So Jef thought he had found an ideal partner in Canon and he worked with them to produce the Cat. A word processing machine with no mouse and no graphics and no BASIC and did one thing and, well, it did that one thing.

Imagine a thing as simple and easy to use as a typewriter but with floppy disks and no way to commit what you wrote to paper except by buying a second machine that’s even more expensive than a typewriter. Canon surely liked that second part.

So what happened to the Cat? Why are you still using a pointlessly programmable device instead of reading this post from a floppy diskette?

Jef‘s vision of an unprogrammable computer was so offensive to the gods, to that inevitable child of Arachne and Hephaestus, that exactly the same thing happened to him a second time. Canon pivoted away from the Cat and invested in the sleekest, blackest, pixeliest computer possible. The NeXT computer by Steve Jobs. Darth Vader’s Macintosh, if object-oriented programming represents the dark side of the Force.

It would be years before Jef’s vision was finally realized with the 2007 release of the iPhone, an appliance that was launched with no mouse, no support for printing, and absolutely no SDK. OK, Steve Jobs stepped in a third time to pull the rug out from under Jef when the iPhone became programmable. This time it was a bit tacky because Jef had died two years earlier. It is no great surprise that you can now plug a mouse directly into these devices.

Perhaps mice are simply inevitable. I could be like Jef and get a Cat or maybe I can just learn to live with them. Hmm. The Cat could have really helped me avoid the many errors that slipped into the email version of my last post. Perhaps I should live with both.