Journal: News & Comment

Tuesday, March 01, 2005
# 11:28:00 AM:

Jef Raskin's battle ends

Permalinks to this entry: individual page or in monthly context. For more material from my journal, visit my home page or the archive.

I missed this while I was in Victoria over the weekend, but computer interface pioneer Jef Raskin died. He had long been a controversial figure in the industry—while he founded Apple's Macintosh project when working at the company in the late '70s and early '80s, his input into the eventual design (after he left Apple in 1982, two years before the Mac's public release) has been a subject of much dispute (see 1, 2, 3), and a bit of parody as well (4, 5).

He always claimed that he worked tirelessly on improving human-computer interaction, but if you tried some of his subsequent work, from the Canon Cat to the Humane Interface (a.k.a. "Archy"), you might find them clever and interesting—but they're not easy to figure out. For me, none of his later ideas has the eureka feeling of the original Mac.

Raskin wanted the Mac to be an easy-to-use, appliance-like tool for everyone. The high-level concept persisted, even if the eventual implementation was different, perhaps better, and definitely more expensive. So, regardless of the details, we owe Raskin thanks for thinking of us regular people, and helping take us away from pure command-line interfaces into something that allowed pointing, clicking, and dragging—and thus PageMaker, Photoshop, and the Web (of course).

 |

Journal Archive »

Template BBEdited on 29-Apr-2010

Site problems? Gripes? Angst? - e-mail dkmiller@penmachine.com
Site contents © 1997–2007 by Derek K. Miller

You may use content from this site non-commercially if you give me credit, under the terms of my Creative Commons license.

eXTReMe Tracker