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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)
#42Way back when I worked at HP in the Software Development Technology Lab, we invited a series of speakers to talk about their view of technology.
We had folks such as Jef Raskin, Ted Nelson, Douglas Englebart, James Burke. All quite fascinating & inspiring people.
Jef brought a Cannon Cat and discussed his views on User Interfaces & more. The MPE OS engineering guys were rather sarcastic in hearing his methodology around the OS approach of the CAT.
Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)
#43Earlier 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…
Or fully embracing the Pascal programming model.
I think it was in one of the On the Metal interviews where one of the guests mentions MPW was a submarine project, from UNIX background engineers, to eventually replace Pascal with C++.
Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)
#44> I would say that in another decade, at least some of what I’m working on will be taken for granted by millions of computer users. It’s been over a decade since the interview. Anyone familiar with anything Raskin was working then that is ubiquitous now?
Jef was a huge proponent of incremental search. That hasn't become mainstream-ubiquitous, but it is certainly code-editor-ubiquitous. Jef being an extremist, he wanted incremental search as the only mechanism for moving the cursor. I have tried editing using only incremental search, and it was awful right up until the moment when I reached for it first instead of wanting a mouse or arrow key and then remembering I wa…
I'm curious as to how time efficient that actually was.
Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)
#45Jef 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…
See another comment that quotes TFA, where what Jef says shows that Canon Cat was not at all "along the lines of his original vision" for the Mackintosh project.
He says that his Mackintosh was also intended to have a graphic display, not a text display, but with a trackball instead of a mouse, therefore it was completely unlike Canon Cat.
Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)
#46Jobs did the right thing, which was to make an affordable Lisa for home computing. The simplicity of the mouse was essential. It's sounds like Jef had other ideas.
Jef wanted a trackball instead of a mouse. The claim that he did not want a pointing device is false.
That would have made little difference for a Mackintosh user. The hardware of a trackball is exactly equivalent with that of a mouse, neither is simpler than the other. (Optical mice without rolling balls have appeared only decades later.)
I have actually used trackballs instead of mice for a few years, and I have greatly preferred them to mice or touchpads.
Trackballs tend to be slower than mice, because you normally move them with the thumb or with the fingers, instead of moving the entire hand, but they are usually more comfortable than mice.
Nowadays, since several years ago, I use as the graphic pointing devices small graphic tablets configured in the relative mode instead of their default absolute mode. These are greatly superior from all points of view, speed, accuracy, comfort, to both mice and trackballs and to any other kinds of pointing devices, like trackpoints or touchpads.
So Jef Raskin had good reasons to question which is the best graphic pointing device, instead of just accepting the mouse because that happened to be the choice made at Xerox.
Based on my experience on how much better a stylus is than any kind of mouse, I consider the use of mice for pointing devices as a great historical mistake in the use of computers. I deeply regret that I have used mice for decades, instead of trying to find something better since the beginning.
The Apple Mackintosh is a significant culprit for the undeserved popularity of mice.
Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)
#47I think that a Jef Raskins Mac would have been a commercial disaster. It would be a nice computer designed for a client: Jef Raskins. He may be the man who started the Macintosh project, but Steve Jobs saved the Mac from him.
The myth that the original Mackintosh was not intended to have a graphic display with a pointing device is debunked in TFA.
The only technical detail that we know about the original Mackintosh that was a mistake was the choice of the MC6809 CPU, for reduced costs.
MC6809 was a very nice CPU and for many programs the Intel 8088 CPU from the IBM PC was slower than a 2 MHz MC6809, but MC6809 was limited to 64 kB of memory, so the original Mackintosh would have become obsolete very quickly.
This is not enough to allow anyone to claim that it would have been a commercial disaster, but it would certainly would have had a short lifetime and then there would have been significant costs to port any software to a replacement CPU with a greater address space.
Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)
#48[flagged]
Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)
#49Jobs did the right thing, which was to make an affordable Lisa for home computing. The simplicity of the mouse was essential. It's sounds like Jef had other ideas.
Jef wanted a trackball instead of a mouse. The claim that he did not want a pointing device is false. That would have made little difference for a Mackintosh user. The hardware of a trackball is exactly equivalent with that of a mouse, neither is simpler than the other. (Optical mice without rolling balls have appeared only decades later.) I have actually used trackballs instead of mice for a few years, and I have gr…
How is your ‘small tablet’ approach different to a trackpad? Do you use the tablet screen somehow? Sounds interesting!
Re: Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)
#50Earlier 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.
> 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?
I'm saying that being designed around the singular task of word processing would have made it a platform/ecosystem failure, even if was a nominally successful one-off product.
The Macintosh (specifically the original 128k version) was a dismal market failure too. What succeeded (relatively speaking) was the platform/ecosystem.