Pretty pictures, bootable floppy disks, and the first Canon Cat demo?

Now that our 1987 Canon Cat is refurbished and ready to go another nine innings or so, it's time to get into the operating system and pull some tricks.

As you'll recall from our historical discussion of the Canon Cat, the Cat was designed by Jef Raskin as a sophisticated user-centric computer but demoted to office machine within Canon's typewriter division, which was tasked with selling it. Because Canon only ever billed the Cat as a "work processor" for documents and communications, and then abruptly tanked it after just six months, it never had any software packages that were commercially produced. In fact, I can't find any software written for it other than the original Tutor and Demo diskettes included with the system and a couple of Canon-specific utilities, which I don't have and don't seem to be imaged anywhere.

So this entry will cover a lot of ground: first, we have to be able to reliably read, image and write Canon disks on another system, then decipher the format, and then patch those images to display pictures and automatically run arbitrary code. At the end we'll have three examples we can image on any PC 3.5" floppy drive and insert into a Cat, turn it on or hit DISK, and have the Cat automatically run: a Jef Raskin "picture disk," a simple but useful dummy terminal, and the world's first (I believe) Canon Cat, two-disk, slightly animated and finely dithered, slideshow graphics demo!

But before we get to pumping out floppy disks, we first need to talk about how one uses a Cat. And that means we need to talk a bit about Forth, the Canon Cat's native tongue. And that means we should probably talk more about the operating system too. Oh, and we should go down to CompUSA and buy a brand new floppy drive while we're at it.