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The Cat was primarily the brainchild of Jef Raskin, originator of the Macintosh project at Apple in 1979. It featured an innovative text-based user interface that did not make use of either a mouse, icons, or graphics. All data was seen as a long "stream" of text broken into several pages. Instead of using a traditional command line interface or menu commands, the Cat made use of its special keyboard, with keys used to activate different commands depending on what particular mode the user was in. The Cat also used special "leap keys" and, by typing strings of characters, the user could navigate to the next occurrence of a particular character string.
The Canon Cat hardware consisted of a 9-inch black-and-white bitmapped monitor, a single 3.5-inch 256K floppy disk drive and a keyboard. It used a Motorola 68000 microprocessor running at 5 MHz, had 256KB of RAM, and had both a parallel port, one RS-232C serial port (DB-25 connector), two RJ-11 telephone jacks and an internal 1200 baud modem.
The Cat's demise was considered to be due to poor marketing on Canon U.S.A.'s part. It also had the misfortune of being launched at a time when the great wave of word processing software packages for personal computers was eradicating the existing installed base of dedicated word processors. It was mistaken for an old-style word processor rather than being seen as a precursor to a new way of handling information.