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?"

Comments

hopes to have it finished in 18 months..

[gl4ss]

yet boosts claims that it really is as good as he claims "when you try it"?

he's got a crystal ball too, then? maybe that's integrated to the product to make it guess what you want. like clippy on speed.

remove the OS and Applications

[peter303]

As I recall from years ago, Jeff used to claim that the division between "Operating System", "Application" and "Content" was big learning barrier and slowed down computer use. So he would essentially abolish the first two items, or at least keep them largely invisible from the user.

I wonder if something like Google Desktop is along these lines. You'd use that to immediately find some information to act on, without having to muck around some cluttered file system.

Likewise MicroSoft's attempt to webify the desktop and access it through the browser is another attempt at hiding barriers. (I will make no comments on whether I think It is working adequately.)

Re:radical, but not new

[binaryDigit]

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).

multi-nationals don't pay taxes

[bodrell]

But, predominantly, Multi-nationals are in the business of reducing wages, labour and environmental standards, and exploitation.

Gee. And here I thought they were in the business of actually producing products. It's amazing that Coca-Cola can actually produce soda, what with all the time they spend figuring out how to screw their employees, despoil the environment and generally bring about armageddon.

I don't think multinational corporations really intend to destroy organized labor or the environment, but they do intend to make money. And sometimes pesky environmental and labor laws of one country get in the way, so they just set up in a country without all those restrictions. And unless someone blows the whistle on them, they will gladly sell you products made by slave labor.

That is not the real problem, though. The real problem is triangle trading schemes that let corporations sell products to themselves at a "loss" so they can claim they made no money. Almost all multinational corporations do this; it's no secret.

In case you aren't familiar with the scheme, the multinational company has subsidiary X in the US, its main headquarters. In some third world country, they have subsidiary Y, which produces, say, tennis shoes. Then they have subsidiary Z, a tiny, unofficial office in the Virgin Islands. Subsidiary Y sells the shoes to subsidiary Z for $3 a pair. Then subsidiary Z sells those same shoes to subsidiary X for $50 a pair. But since subsidiary Y is not officially part of the multinational, so it appears the company is LOSING $47 on each pair of shoes. They sell them in the US for $97 a pair, and the net balance is zero. No taxes to pay. Or in some cases, when there is a negative net balance, they ask for bailout money from the government (and that money sure didn't come from taxes the corporation paid).

You can easily imagine a company using subsidiary Y in the opposite way, to artificially inflate corporation income if necessary to meet Wall Street's expectations.