Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)

tylerdane

Fav quote: "I have made changes in the world that are beyond what most people thought was possible, and I hope that my judgment continues to be good as to what is possible to change and what is not."

NetMageSCW

That interviewer really seemed to be ignorant of the facts as Jeff knows them and asked questions that kept annoying him. Left the strong impression that Jeff thought him an idiot and his questions leave the reader feeling Jeff might be right.

Someone

https://folklore.org/The_Father_of_The_Macintosh.html : “There's no doubt that Jef was the creator of the Macintosh project at Apple, and that his articulate vision of an exceptionally easy to use, low cost, high volume appliance computer got the ball rolling, and remained near the heart of the project long after Jef left the company. He also deserves ample credit for putting together the extraordinary initial team that created the computer, recruiting former student Bill Atkinson to Apple and then hiring amazing individuals like Burrell Smith, Bud Tribble, Joanna Hoffman and Brian Howard for the Macintosh team. But there is also no escaping the fact that the Macintosh that we know and love is very different than the computer that Jef wanted to build, so much so that he is much more like an eccentric great uncle than the Macintosh's father. Jef did not want to incorporate what became the two most definitive aspects of Macintosh technology - the Motorola 68000 microprocessor and the mouse pointing device. Jef preferred the 6809, a cheaper but weaker processor which only had 16 bits of address space and would have been obsolete in just a year or two, since it couldn't address more than 64Kbytes. He was dead set against the mouse as well, preferring dedicated meta-keys to do the pointing. He became increasingly alienated from the team, eventually leaving entirely in the summer of 1981, when we were still just getting started, and the final product utilitized very few of the ideas in the Book of Macintosh. In fact, if the name of the project had changed after Steve took over in January 1981, and it almost did (see Bicycle), there wouldn't be much reason to correlate it with his ideas at all.”

latexr

> I would say that in another decade, at least some of what I’m working on will be taken for granted by millions of computer users. It’s been over a decade since the interview. Anyone familiar with anything Raskin was working then that is ubiquitous now?

pavlov

The date in the title should be 2005, not 2013. At the end of the article it reads: > This article was first published on 2005.01.19. It’s also evidenced by the reference to the “new iMac G5.”

andai

See also Jef's excellent book, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface

GeekyBear

Jef did go on to create a computer along the lines of his original vision after leaving Apple. > The Canon Cat used a text-based user interface, without any pointer, 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 system, the Cat used its special keyboard, with commands activated by holding down a "Use Front" key and pressing another key. https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat It was nothing like the Macintosh Apple shipped.

coldtea

Visionary, yes. Behind the Macintosh project, yes. Behind the Mac, as in, behind the Mac as it actually shipped, no. His ideas had little to do with it - it was almost entirely stuff designed by others when he was out of the project.

a4isms

In addition to his book, I am constantly linking to "Intuitive Equals Familiar:" https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html A short must-read for people designing (via prompt or any other tool) user experiences. It is timeless (so far!)

shae

I got to meet Jef Raskin in the early 2000s when he gave a talk in Sweden. He was a fun person to chat with, lots of great ideas and the drive to work out the details.

labrador

Jobs did the right thing, which was to make an affordable Lisa for home computing. The simplicity of the mouse was essential. It's sounds like Jef had other ideas.

elzbardico

I think that a Jef Raskins Mac would have been a commercial disaster. It would be a nice computer designed for a client: Jef Raskins. He may be the man who started the Macintosh project, but Steve Jobs saved the Mac from him.

IOT_Apprentice

Way back when I worked at HP in the Software Development Technology Lab, we invited a series of speakers to talk about their view of technology. We had folks such as Jef Raskin, Ted Nelson, Douglas Englebart, James Burke. All quite fascinating & inspiring people. Jef brought a Cannon Cat and discussed his views on User Interfaces & more. The MPE OS engineering guys were rather sarcastic in hearing his methodology around the OS approach of the CAT.