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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)

#31

Post by II2II »

Animats wrote: post #24
kickingvegas wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The Canon Cat is a good text editor. That's about all it does.

Everything I've read suggested that Raskin intended it to be programmable from the beginning, using Forth. Other descriptions suggested that, while document oriented, it was not intended to be exclusively oriented towards word processing. At least not in the sense of the (dedicated) word processors of the day. That said, I'm not surprised that user interaction was keyboard based. The project had it's origins around 1978/79. It would be about 5 years until computers were sufficiently powerful to support a coherent GUI at a reasonable price.

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

#32

Post by asveikau »

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.

> certainly would have led to a path where Macintosh was just another abandoned experiment like the Apple III.

This seems really extreme. You're saying a trackpad would have made the whole thing a failure?

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

#34

Post by ralfd »

pavlov wrote: post #10

The date in the title should be 2005, not 2013. At the end of the article it reads: > This article was first published on 2005.01.19. It’s also evidenced by the reference to the “new iMac G5.”

Raskin also died a month later at 26. Februar 2005 (cancer).

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

#35

Post by II2II »

musicale wrote: post #30
simondotau wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 upgra…

Assuming the Mac folks had no interest in converging the platform in favour of the Lisa is somewhat unfair. While it sounds like some code was shared between the two platforms, the Lisa's operating system was quite different. It would have been difficult to make Lisa software operate under the Macintosh System Software. To my knowledge, there was virtually no software for the Lisa anyhow. Breaking software compatibility on the Macintosh to get the benefits of Lisa would have been a terrible business decision.

Aside from that, the MMU in the Lisa would have been a custom solution which Apple would have to support. When Motorola introduced an MMU, it was for 68020 generation machines. Apple should have been able to introduce memory protection at that point, but didn't. One of the reasons was that Apple struggled to make that next generation operating system while retaining compatibility with existing software (albeit, memory protection may have been only one of many problems). This was by no means a problem exclusive to Apple. Other platforms ran into similar issues.

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

#36

Post by bitwize »

Animats wrote: post #24
kickingvegas wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It looked like a mere word processor, but—much like Emacs, especially org-mode—the Canon Cat was actually contextually aware of what the text meant, and allowed other operations to be performed on it as appropriate. For example, if you start typing numbers into tables, spreadsheet-like functionality became available, including the ability to perform mathematical operations over those numbers and have cells dynamically updated with the new values. Raskin called it a "work processor".

The Forth language was available for programming and extending the machine, via a cheatcode. You had to type in the phrase "enable the Forth language" and evaluate it with a special command or something—you know, one of those things to provide hackability for those who needed such while keeping it an office appliance for the vast majority of users. I don't know if there was an intent for a market or library of third-party software, but that doesn't seem to have arisen.

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

#37

Post by musicale »

II2II wrote: post #35
musicale wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 upgra…

Assuming the Mac folks had no interest in converging the platform in favour of the Lisa is somewhat unfair. While it sounds like some code was shared between the two platforms, the Lisa's operating system was quite different. It would have been difficult to make Lisa software operate under the Macintosh System Software. To my knowledge, there was virtually no software for the Lisa anyhow. Breaking software compatibil…

Apple doesn't seem to have leveraged or combined work on (Lisa, Lisa Smalltalk, Lisa Xenix, Mac OS, A/UX, ...) as successfully as they might have. As you note, protected memory was deferred to multiple failed Mac OS successor projects (Pink/Taligent, Copland/NuKernel, etc.) Ultimately Apple gave up, acquired Steve Jobs and NeXT, and eventually successfully migrated the Mac platform to an OS with memory protection.

Since then however Apple's OS and hardware strategy has been much more coherent, with macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS etc. sharing code, and sharing SoC technology as well. Ironically this is similar to Microsoft's "Windows [NT] everywhere" strategy.

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

#38

Post by leoc »

II2II wrote: post #35
musicale wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 upgra…

Assuming the Mac folks had no interest in converging the platform in favour of the Lisa is somewhat unfair. While it sounds like some code was shared between the two platforms, the Lisa's operating system was quite different. It would have been difficult to make Lisa software operate under the Macintosh System Software. To my knowledge, there was virtually no software for the Lisa anyhow. Breaking software compatibil…

That delay in shipping a memory-protected Mac was probably originally at least as much the result of upper-management politics as anything else. After Jobs left Apple Gassée cancelled Jobs’ pet project, the Big Mac which was intended to run Mac applications on a Unix base. Big Mac project leader Rich Page (and IIRC some other project members) rang Steve Jobs begging him to do something, and the rest is history.

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

#39

Post by bombcar »

II2II wrote: post #29
simondotau wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The defining aspect of the Macintosh for me will always be the mandatory GUI - most everything else had it as either an entire afterthought, or at least as a “program started later”.

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

#40

Post by jnaina »

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…

Jef's vision for a high volume appliance computer was eventually realized in the Canon Cat which he co-created with Canon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat

Vision may spark greatness, but execution is what makes it real. The Hacker News crowd can debate endlessly about who conceived the Macintosh while dumping on Steve Jobs.

But Steve Jobs did what ultimately mattered: he shipped.

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