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GUI Pioneer Jef Raskin Has Passed Away
Viridian writes "Jef Raskin, GUI pioneer, interface expert, Apple employee #31, and the man most credited with the creation of the Apple Macintosh, died of cancer on Saturday February 26, 2005. It was Raskin who named it after his favorite fruit, the McIntosh apple, although he said that he changed the spelling to "Macintosh" to avoid potential copyright conflicts with McIntosh, the audio equipment manufacturer."
Controversial in his views, at least he had some mindshare and was pushing the envelope in innovation with his interface experiments. Rather than incrementally changing what has become the de facto UI over tha past 20 years, he was willing to step out of the box, get some metrics and push a vision for "easy to use" software and interfaces.
Not just some crank with wild ideas, he was able to get some of his visions into practice and leverage that developmental capital into newer and more refined methods and idioms.
We've lost a visionary folks, and that's just a shame. His loss hurts us all.
They had a good enough reason for that... Why Apple Uses One Buttoned Mice
Sad news indeed. :(
Heres some more information I found about the naming of macintosh apples.
"The Macintosh project began at Apple as one code-named Annie, and spearheaded not by Steve Jobs (he actually lobbied against the Mac project at one point) but by Jeff Raskin, a former computer professor and Apple employee number 31. Raskin is generally credited with quickly changing the codename from Annie to Macintosh, an obvious tie to the Apple brand. Macintosh was spelled differently than the apple variety, however, in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid trademark disputes. Apple itself, lore has it, was named by Steve Jobs for either his love of the Beatles (and their Apple Records label), his interest in health foods, or because of his fond experiences working in the apple orchards of Oregon during a brief stint at college there. Or for none of those reasons. Except for the short-lived Pippin operating system, Apple the company thankfully avoided any other product references to varieties of apple, the fruit."
(taken from creativepro)
I've seen a few comments like this, but the reality is that Jef and Steve weren't exactly close. Iirc Jef was fired shortly before the Mac shipped. He's always been very quick to point out his connection to the first Mac (for obvious reasons) but I've never heard of anyone at Apple talking about him as a pioneer or a VIP. If Woz died, I'm sure there would be something from Apple PR about it, but this guy was no Woz.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
He'll be missed.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
A lot of Raskin's ideas were very text-centric and wouldn't be entirely applicable to people developing applications for processing graphics, for example, but I still feel that The Humane Interface should be required reading for anyone intending to develop software, even on an amateur basis.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If you get your McIntoshs at the market they probably are bland and tasteless. I can drive 20 minutes from here in pretty much any direction and pick my own, in season. Nothing like 'em fresh!
We usually wait for Macouns a week or two later, though.
All the "eastern" types are better than any of the "delicious" types, when fresh. If I want to buy eating apples in the winter, I go for a Braeburn, usually from New Zealand. Expensive, but they're huge. One is usually too much.
From Linda Blum, his wife, comes this note: Dear Friends, Jef died this evening, surrounded by friends and family, with some favorite music playing. While I am overcome by a profound sense of sadness and am not looking forward the days, weeks and years ahead without him, I am also relieved that he did not suffer for a long time and that he is at peace and no longer in pain. There will be a memorial service, time and date to be determined. ----------- My first thoughts: We lost one of the great ones today, a good and generous man. Jef Raskin died of cancer this evening, after being sick for several months. A wonderful spirit and renaissance man, who inspired me and many others. He created the Macintosh project at Apple in 1979, naming it after his personal favorite fruit He left Apple to form Information Appliances, where he designed the Canon Cat with an innovative interface. He continued refining human interface design, publishing his ideas in The Humane Interface (Addison Wesley, 2000.) The Humane Interface ideas are being implemented in the Raskin Center project Archy, where is son, Aza, is a programmer. His artwork was displayed at New York's Museum of Modern Art. He conducted the San Francisco Chamber Opera Society and wrote the score for a movie, "Smog Patterns," shown on PBS. He has a patent for a "Construction Technique for an Airplane Wing," and was a noted model airplane designer, an accomplished archer, and an occasional race car driver. Website is http://jef.raskincenter.org/home/index.html .There is also a collection of photographs and history at http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/index.h tml Jennie Bourne and I are in the midst of making a movie about him http://www.jefthemovie.com .
Slashdot previously covered his project, and there is some interesting discussion about some of his ideas in this article.
Also, it's a Sunday. Does anyone think PR departments are considered particularly active about now?
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Insightful?
You are wrong. Apple didn't steal anything. They licensed part of the GUI idea from Xerox and added many of their own ideas in the creation of the Mac OS.
See: http://www.mackido.com/Interface/ui_history.html
Jef Raskin had practically nothing to do with the Macintosh. He had the initial vision of an easy-to-use computer appliance, but he left the Mac project in 1981, a full three years before the Macintosh shipped. Apart from the core vision, which started with Jef but rapidly diverged from what he had in mind, there's essentially no Raskin in the Mac.
Neither does Raskins website either. Maybe you should drop him an email?
The blurb was incorrect. Jef did not design the Mac user interface. He had basically nothing to do with the Mac, in fact. He started the project with his idea for a computer that should be easy to use, but he left the Mac project in 1981, years before the team produced an actual computer.
Good lord, your post made my brain hurt.
First: Jef Raskin did not design the Mac UI. He wasn't even involved with he. Rather, he was the vision guy behind the Macintosh. He came up with the idea of an easy-to-use computer and convinced Apple's board to pursue it. When Steve Jobs took over the Macintosh project, Jef left. That was 1981, years before there was anything even like the Macintosh UI.
Second: The Mac UI was essentially identical to the Lisa UI. The key difference was that on the Mac the pixels were square. The user experience -- overlapping windows, the mouse, the menu bar --was exactly the same.
Well, you're partly wrong. Apple, Microsoft and Xerox all borrowed ideas from somewhere else (that isn't necessarily bad, you know ... it's what makes progress possible.) The real crime is trying to lock up good ideas forever. But in any event, I would say the real GUI pioneer was a man named Doug Englebart, whose remarkable demonstration in 1968 at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco really laid the groundwork for what we all think of as a modern computer. Behind that demo was six years of hard work by Englebart and seventeen others at the Standford Research Institute. It took a couple decades for those ideas to take off, but take off they did.
Just FYI, streaming video of the Englebart demo is available HERE if you can handle RealMedia.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The following documents provide a nice insight in the man's work at Apple on the Mac project:i ndex.html/
http://library.stanford.edu/mac/primary/docs/bom/
especially the article on Design Considerations (M4.1) makes a nice read:
"If the computer must be opened for any reason other than repair (for which our prospective user must be assumed incompetent) even at the dealer's, then it does not meet our requirements. Seeing the guts is taboo. Things in sockets is taboo (unless to make servicing cheaper without imposing too large an initial cost). Billions of keys on the keyboard is taboo. Computerese is taboo. Large manuals, or many of them (large manuals are a sure sign of bad design) is taboo. Self- instructional programs are NOT taboo.
There must not be a plethora of configurations. It is better to offer a variety of case colors than to have variable amounts of memory. It is better to manufacture versions in Early American, Contemporary, and Louis XIV than to have any external wires beyond a power cord.
And you get ten points if you can eliminate the power cord."
(may read 'IMHO' wherever omitted from above text)
Jef Raskins work at Apple, with the Mac is well documented at www.folklore.org. The site created by Andy Hertzfeld has now been made into a book called Revolution in The Valley - a collection of esoteric stories that chronical the birth and development the Mac.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
Raskin's vision was for an easy to use, CHEAP, computer for the everyman. It was actually quite different from what the Mac actually became. About the only credit he deserves in that regard is for the name (did you know the marketeers tried to change it to "Bicycle" ?!?) and for starting the project. The rest is pretty much to the credit of Jobs and the Mac team.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
... without the man who actually had a good grasp on UI technology and THE behind it, the development is likely to go the wrong way ...
I disagree. Who better to take over than his son?
It was Raskin who named it after his favorite fruit, the McIntosh apple, although he said that he changed the spelling to "Macintosh" to avoid potential copyright conflicts with McIntosh, the audio equipment manufacturer.
Once again.. for the millionth time: it's not about copyright when you are dealing with brand names (like M[a]cIntosh), it's a trademark issue.
But considering that:
- Raskin attacked the Mac in an October 2004 interview in The Guardian.
- He wasn't a current employee
- Corporate death notices sting corporations stock prices
- There's further suspected but unpublicized animosity between Apple and Raskin
My guess is that it probably won't be mentioned on Apple's website on Monday, but it will be all over many mac community websites by then.Sigh. It's very easy to find out the truth about this, yet still the myth persists. Xerox developed some of the GUI concepts (bitmapped display, windows, mouse input, buttons), but Apple were INVITED to view their work in return for investment in the company. What they saw inspired the Lisa and later Mac interface, but Apple added: overlapping moveable windows, pull down menus, the menu bar, mouse dragging, icons, self-refreshing windows, the entire direct manipulation interface for the file system (Finder), resources, drag and drop, and numerous other details that we take for granted today. None of these came from Xerox. Apple employed a number of engineers that started out at Xerox, and it's certain they brought their knowledge with them and extended it at Apple. Is that theft? If they didn't sign a contract forbidding use of intellectual property after leaving the company, then no. (And who ever had that in their contract in those days?). Apple overlooked one thing however, and that's the SmallTalk language - if they had brought object-oriented programming to the Mac along with the GUI concepts right from the start then perhaps Apple's place in history might have been even greater....
It's not taking anything away from Jef to set the record straight about who did what, he was a pioneer and we'll definitely miss him. I hope the humane interface project can survive without him.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Burrell Smith started as an electronic technician at Apple, not as a design engineer. Though brilliant in his own way, it's an open historical question whether his design talent would have been noticed by Apple's then management without Jef's initial championing. Jef also introduced one of his previous grad students, Bill Atkinson, to a job opportunity at Apple, Atkinson being a key engineer (one of the ones who went on that first technical visit to Xerox PARC) without whom probably neither the Lisa or the Mac would have come into existance.
The Raskin Center has been carrying on his work ... hopefully they'll continue it, especially with the funding they've been given. Oh, the name of THE has been changed, and it's scope has been expanded.
-Billy
Bullshit.
It was Raskin who pushed for the use of bitmapped displays (even Wozniak, let alone Jobs, had a hard time being convinced to depart from character generators). He proposed them as early as 1969 (sixty-nine) in his PhD dissertation. That's even before PARC got created. Jobs was probably still wetting his bed in 1969.
It was Raskin who had to convince Jobs to visit PARC.
It was Raskin who simplified PARC's cumbersome three-button mouse interface to the point that only one button was required. And he was actually still not quite happy with the mouse as an input device.
What were you saying?
His son, Aza Raskin, will take over I assume. If you look at raskincenter.org (after the memorium thing) you'll see he's been a very active member. I'm sure the rest of the Archy team will continue, despite this horrific loss. I really admired this guy and his ideas. He might have been a little nuts sometimes, but most Renaissance men are (yes, he was a true Renaissance man).
When the 128k mac shipped, the signatures of the people who created it were molded on the inside of the case. Here's the collection; Jef's name in the bottom-left corner.
That's probably the best mention Apple gave Raskin - his name's inside every 128k and 512k mac.
I play Nerd-Folk!