Visionaries and origin

The term Information Appliance was coined by Jef Raskin one of the original employees of Apple Computer, and the designer of the Canon Cat dedicated word processor mentioned above. The term and the ideas behind it were later explained in detail by Donald Norman in his book The invisible computer. The information appliance is the other type of device that Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO, mentioned, aside from the network computer, that would take over the desktop PC.