Comments on: Jef Raskin, creator of the Macintosh, has died.

Jef Raskin, creator of the Macintosh, has died.

killdevil — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 13:23:54 -0800

Jeff Raskin, widely considered the father of the Macintosh computer, has died. Visit folklore.org for stories chronicling the birth of the computer Jef named after his favorite varietal (but misspelled in order to avoid confusion). Jef's contributions to the development of simple, intelligible, "humane" computing environments didn't end with the Mac; learn more here and here.

By: killdevil

killdevil — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 13:30:18 -0800

I've gotten his name wrong above - it's Jef, not Jeff. Alas.

By: TwelveTwo

TwelveTwo — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 13:33:50 -0800

Sad to have such a character die and likely into obscurity. With the bulk of the credit going to the current CEO and oily-armpitted man. (Here come the periods of silence . )

By: breath

breath — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 13:35:12 -0800

By: esd

esd — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 13:41:13 -0800

To be fair, Raskin's ideas related to the Macintosh seem to have been pretty general ones (a low-cost, easy to use computer) that Steve Jobs then brought to fruition. That said, having not known the man personally, I'll definitely miss his influence. I spent many a long, human-computer-interaction-filled night at my local library with The Humane Interface at the core of my studies.

By: berek

berek — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 13:41:22 -0800

I'm sorry the guys dead and all, but Macs still suck.

By: Smart Dalek

Smart Dalek — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 13:43:16 -0800

Damn. I used to visit his sourceforge site every once in awhile. .

By: Substrata

Substrata — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 13:44:08 -0800

more: the folks at Digibarn did a couple of recent interviews

By: Larzarus

Larzarus — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 14:00:26 -0800

Honestly, I'll miss his column & letters in the weekly Pacifica paper here. Especially his rants against our inept town council--he was usually right.

By: kindall

kindall — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 14:02:01 -0800

Jef resisted adding a mouse to the Macintosh. His vision was entirely different from what came to pass. You can tell what kind of UI he preferred by looking at the Canon Cat or the SwyftCard for the Apple II. Those were brilliant, frankly, but his ideas have always been a bit too weird for the mainstream. In his book, The Humane Interface, he actually suggests that incoming e-mail simply be inserted in the middle of whatever you're working on, just before the insertion point. Then you can simply select it and move it wherever you want it (you'd set up a part of the document -- in his paradigm there was only ever one document -- which had the text "e-mail goes here" so you could easily search for it, searching being the only way to navigate in his system). Despite his claims that this actually works better than it sounds, there are only about 10,000,000 reasons nobody would ever want e-mail to work like that. He also never did explain how his leaping UI would be useful for working with graphics, or music, or video, or the Web for that matter. In other words, it was a fairly effective metaphor for working with text, and not so much for anything else. That said... his ideas were always thought-provoking and his passing is a loss to everyone who likes to think. We need more people who think outside the box just for the fun of seeing where it leads. Even if it's off into the weeds.

By: ChrisR

ChrisR — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 15:01:09 -0800

By: justgary

justgary — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 15:19:37 -0800

That said... his ideas were always thought-provoking and his passing is a loss to everyone who likes to think. We need more people who think outside the box just for the fun of seeing where it leads. Even if it's off into the weeds. Exactly. He was out there, but never boring. First Hunter S. Thompson and now Raskin. People I didn't always agree with, but always respected. I'm sorry the guys dead and all, but Macs still suck. You paid 5 bucks to post idiotic comments like that? You could have trolled somewhere else for free.

By: tommasz

tommasz — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 15:41:47 -0800

Damn. A sad reminder that the making of the Mac was over twenty years ago.

By: petrilli

petrilli — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 19:57:38 -0800

For those thinking about the creation of the Macintosh, it is difficult to give credit to Raskin for many things that he simply observed elsewhere, most specifically at Xerox PARC. He had some original ideas, but in many ways, they were often just the foil for what eventually happened. This is not to argue that he did not contribute, but sometimes he had a tendency to overblow his own contribution as opposed to the work done at PARC on actually creating the ideas that the Macintosh attempted to popularize. As for a reminder that it's been 20 years, you might read the interview with Alan Kay in ACM Queue for a take on one of the true pioneers of the computing work. A man who, along with his coworkers created nearly everything we today use to think about computing, and his observations on how little we've changed in 25 years.

By: mwhybark

mwhybark — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 21:56:08 -0800

. what a character.

By: Quietgal

Quietgal — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 22:08:49 -0800

Although history will remember Jef mostly as the father of the Mac, it should be pointed out that his greatest passion (after his family) was mathematics. A lesser passion was for his favorite hobby of radio controlled model airplanes. He designed the Anabat, a foam-core aircraft with tape stress-skinned wings - this was the first use of adhesive tape as a structural part of a model airplane. Jef also put some effort into understanding airflow at the very low Reynolds numbers that apply to small light model airplanes. He described a very effective airfoil that is easy to build. In keeping with his ease-of-use mantra, a layman can calculate, plan and build this airfoil without additional aeronautical knowledge. His inquisitive mind led him to question everything, which made him some enemies, but in the end we are all richer for his forays into engineering and design. Credits: most of this comes from Hubby, who flew and built model airplanes with Jef. We miss him, both as an innovative lateral thinker and as a friend. Farewell.

By: majick

majick — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 22:21:17 -0800

I've always enjoyed Raskin's design and computing ideas -- even though I often believed he was wrong. He seems like a man who went out of his way to provoke thought in others, which is admirable.

By: John Kenneth Fisher

John Kenneth Fisher — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 01:35:59 -0800

The man had brilliant ideas that, thank god, other people at Apple were smart enough to override. That said.... .

By: allaboutgeorge

allaboutgeorge — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 03:23:03 -0800

By: scalz

scalz — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 17:27:08 -0800

Macs suck? XEROX PARC! Read the links! .

By: rough ashlar

rough ashlar — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 21:03:16 -0800

At least Jef didn't wash his feet in the toilet as a 'mini-vacation'.