The Canon Cat at 39: Raskin's Machine That Time Forgot

June 26, 2026

The Canon Cat went on sale in the United States in July 1987. By the end of that year it was gone — discontinued after roughly six months and estimated sales of around 20,000 units. It cost $1,495, looked like a dedicated word processor, and was designed by Jef Raskin, the man who had originated the Macintosh project at Apple before leaving the company in 1982.

Thirty-nine years is a long time to sustain a cult following for a machine that almost no one bought. The Cat has one, and the interest is not nostalgia. Developers have built emulators and web recreations of its interface as recently as 2025. Hacker News threads on the Cat appear with regularity and attract detailed technical discussion. The machine keeps getting rediscovered by people building text editors, command palettes, and conversational AI interfaces, all of whom find in it a design that addressed problems they thought were new.