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Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)

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Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)

#21

Post by kickingvegas »

GeekyBear wrote: post #15

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 Fro…

After seeing a video of the Canon Cat in action, I thought “so, this is a lot like Emacs”.

Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)

#22

Post by mewse-hn »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #3

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.

It's not a great interview and it's sad that Raskin passed a month later.

> JW: The original Mac was to be sold for $600. When it finally arrived it cost $2,500 and today the cheapest Mac is $699. Is this a disappointment to you?

> JR: Which? the $2,500, the $699? It was never supposed to be $600.

Like.. terrible question, annoyed interview subject.

Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)

#24

Post by Animats »

kickingvegas wrote: post #21
GeekyBear wrote: post #15

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 Fro…

After seeing a video of the Canon Cat in action, I thought “so, this is a lot like Emacs”.

It is, kind of. The Canon Cat is a good text editor. That's about all it does.

When Raskin was active, there was a whole industry selling "word processors", special purpose computers that just did text processing. Wang and IBM were the biggest makers. The IBM PC was descended from the IBM Displaywriter and used the same monitor. So at the time, word processing looked like the core desktop computer function.

So Raskin perfected the word processor interface. What he didn't get was that computing was not going to stop at word processors.

Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)

#26

Post by simondotau »

adrian_b wrote: post #12
Someone wrote: post #5

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 t…

In TFA, Jef Raskin claims that the story about the mouse is not entirely correct: JR: No. I designed it to be graphical from the ground up. But the text portions of the interface, which I also cared about, would have been cleaner. People have put together my dislike of the mouse (confusing dislike for a particular input device with dislike for graphic input devices in general; I personally prefer trackballs and table…

History is written by the victors. In this case it’s completely fine, as Raskin’s “corrections” don’t really amount to much, and certainly would have led to a path where Macintosh was just another abandoned experiment like the Apple III.

Perhaps in this alternate universe, a substantially reworked “Lisa II” might have been Apple’s long-lived computing platform.

Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)

#28

Post by WillAdams »

adrian_b wrote: post #12
Someone wrote: post #5

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 t…

In TFA, Jef Raskin claims that the story about the mouse is not entirely correct: JR: No. I designed it to be graphical from the ground up. But the text portions of the interface, which I also cared about, would have been cleaner. People have put together my dislike of the mouse (confusing dislike for a particular input device with dislike for graphic input devices in general; I personally prefer trackballs and table…

Part of this was due to Steve Jobs insisting on no arrow keys on the O.G. Mac's keyboard so as to force usage of the mouse.

Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)

#29

Post by II2II »

simondotau wrote: post #26
adrian_b wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In TFA, Jef Raskin claims that the story about the mouse is not entirely correct: JR: No. I designed it to be graphical from the ground up. But the text portions of the interface, which I also cared about, would have been cleaner. People have put together my dislike of the mouse (confusing dislike for a particular input device with dislike for graphic input devices in general; I personally prefer trackballs and table…

History is written by the victors. In this case it’s completely fine, as Raskin’s “corrections” don’t really amount to much, and certainly would have led to a path where Macintosh was just another abandoned experiment like the Apple III. Perhaps in this alternate universe, a substantially reworked “Lisa II” might have been Apple’s long-lived computing platform.

The corrections may not amount to much, but there is no reason to believe that his version would be a failed experiment like the Apple III or the Lisa would have taken it's place.

Part of the magic of the Macintosh was the simplicity of the hardware. In that respect, it was much closer to the Apple II than the Apple III or Lisa. Consumers may not think much about what's inside the case, but it matters when it comes to manufacturing costs and that translates into the cost for consumers. While the original Macintosh was by no means cheap, it was about half the cost of the Apple III and a quarter of the cost of the Lisa. Heck, even the adoption of the Macintosh was slow because of its price. Maybe a less expensive 6809 based Macintosh would have had more success in the market, at least early on. It's also too easy to read too much into the failure of the Canon Cat. The Canon Cat was introduced years later. User expectations were starting to solidify around the GUI at that point. (Then again, success was not guaranteed. Lacking compatibility with the Apple II would have held it back. Especially so after the introduction of the IBM PC since the IBM PC had IBM backing it.)

I also think the adoption of the GUI for consumer computers would have been delayed considerably without the Macintosh 128k. Early machines that supported a GUI tended to be expensive. Early versions of Windows were crude. The only real outliers in that respect were the Atari and the Amiga. Would they have supported a GUI without Apple taking that first step? It's hard to tell.

Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)

#30

Post by musicale »

simondotau wrote: post #26
adrian_b wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In TFA, Jef Raskin claims that the story about the mouse is not entirely correct: JR: No. I designed it to be graphical from the ground up. But the text portions of the interface, which I also cared about, would have been cleaner. People have put together my dislike of the mouse (confusing dislike for a particular input device with dislike for graphic input devices in general; I personally prefer trackballs and table…

History is written by the victors. In this case it’s completely fine, as Raskin’s “corrections” don’t really amount to much, and certainly would have led to a path where Macintosh was just another abandoned experiment like the Apple III. Perhaps in this alternate universe, a substantially reworked “Lisa II” might have been Apple’s long-lived computing platform.

Lisa 2 was cheaper than many later Macs, but the Mac folks seemed to have little interest in convergent evolution for the platforms or in integrating Lisa features like memory protection into the Mac. The result was that Lisa died as the Macintosh XL (ex-Lisa), with a Mac compatibility environment (MacWorks, which looked terrible with the stock Lisa rectangular pixels but better with a "Screen Kit" square pixel upgrade) as a consolation prize, while Mac users had to wait until Mac OS X for memory protection. Ultimately the Lisa hardware was able to run 68K versions of Mac OS through 7.6.1 in 1997.
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