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Jef Raskin Gets $2 Million To Develop RCHI
Dr Twox writes "The Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces has received a $2 million dollar boost from a multi-national corporation to further develop Jef Raskin's RCHI project, a radical new and simple to way interact with computers. Co-creator of the Macintosh and author of The Humane Interface, Raskin hopes to have RCHI finished within 18 months. "When you actually try it," says Jef. "It actually does what we say. We've got the goods."
It's built with Python and SDL, so how long before someone ports this to *nix?"
Then Jeff partnered with the Cannon [ copier ] company with the CAT-PC.
Yes, I have one, it's an interesting beast. It wasn't so much that the disk was a giant piece of text, what you did was save the entire state of the computers memory onto the floppy. If you wanted to start a new document, then you would simply plop in a blank floppy. The whole thing was written in Forth and there is an "easter egg" that allows you to get direct access to the Forth interpreter.
However the most "novel" thing about it was how you navigated. It didn't use a pointing device (i.e. mouse) but used two dedicated keys on the keyboards labeled "JUMP" (you'll have to forgive me, it's been a while since I've had it out and played with it, so this might not be perfectly correct). You would use the jump keys to "hop" around the document/screen.
There was also an add-in card made for the Apple II that was basically a Cat on a card. If anyone knows of one of these, please let me know. There was also one laptop made, but Jef himself has it and he's not giving it up (or at least wasn't when I asked him about it a few years ago).