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Minority Report: Jef Raskin and the Mac revolution
What he accomplished "for the rest of us"

By Seb Janacek

Published: Thursday 03 March 2005

Jef Raskin, who died this week, was among those who gave birth to the Apple Macintosh. Here, Seb Janacek considers his legacy.

It's hardly accurate to describe Jef Raskin as the 'forgotten' father of the original Macintosh. The man continued to allude to his role in the creation of the computer in his many interviews and publications, even 20 years after he left Apple. And why not? It's quite a title.

However, given the overwhelming presence of Steve Jobs that surrounds the launch and development of the first Macintosh in 1984, it's easy for those who aren't au fait with the colourful and complex history of Apple to understand the phenomenal importance that Jef Raskin had on the development of personal computing.

Raskin joined Apple's publications team in 1978 as employee number 31 and the following year proposed the idea for a user-friendly computer for the man in the street.

Inspired in part by research from the Xerox PARC institute, the computer was to be built around human-centred design principles, which hid the complexity of cables and circuit boards from users inside an all-in-one enclosure.

His key realisation: usability would be crucial to the success of the Macintosh - the computer should be a pleasure to use.

The machine was originally pitched as a $500 computer but as the scope of the project began to creep to include beefier storage and better graphics facilities the cost crept towards $1,000.

Raskin also had a name for his computer. Abandoning the convention of giving products female code names (which he considered sexist) he named his labour of love after his favourite kind of apple - the McIntosh.

He altered the name to avoid potential copyright wranglings with a hi-fi manufacturer of the same name - which ended up happening anyway.

After a series of clashes with Steve Jobs, who gradually wrested control of the project from him, Raskin quit Apple in the summer of 1981, three years before the Macintosh eventually launched.

After leaving the company he designed the Canon Cat, a critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful computer, and in later years worked on the Humane Environment, a system incorporating his interface concepts with open source elements.

So what is the legacy of Jef Raskin? Well, unless you've printed this off, you're probably looking at it on a screen. Raskin can be credited with the pitch for the first commercially successful computer with a graphical user interface.

He didn't guide the Macintosh project to its launch in 1984, or have a part in shaping some of the fundamental elements that make the Macintosh experience what it is, but his vision of a computer for everyone, based around the principles of human-centred design made it through intact - even though the final version may not have met with his approval.

The Mac's guiding spirit of fun and usability has endured through the many incarnations of the computer "for the rest of us", from the first in 1984 to the latest iteration of Mac OS X.

Not that the most recent Macintosh interface was entirely to Raskin's tastes, either. In a 2004 interview with MacUser magazine, Raskin scorned the much-vaunted OSX GUI, claiming that Apple's iterative approach of adding more and more features to the cat-themed OS was woefully misguided and advocated a return to first principles of human design interaction.

He described OS X as "bloated, under-documented and constraining to developers", claiming the interface had scaled poorly.

"It has gone from insanely great to insanely gross," he said, referring to the infamous phrase Jobs used to evangelise the Mac during its development.

It's clear that the birth of the Macintosh was the result of the right people in the right place at the right time and Raskin's role in this is undeniably crucial.

The project would have never come to fruition without the drive and talent of the Apple software and hardware wizards who toiled for 90 hours a week beneath a pirate flag in a Cupertino office.

Neither is it possible to understate the influence and tenacity of Steve Jobs and his ability to drive his team to its limits to deliver the Mac, against the odds and with spectacular results. However, it is fair to say that in doing so he stood on the shoulders of giants.

As accomplishments go, defining the ethos of the Macintosh isn't a bad one to mark down for posterity. That beneath the beige, coloured plastic or brushed metal computer cases, the true spirit of Mac is about the way it engages its user in the realm of interpretation. Raskin's original vision is the spirit that has endured, the ghost in the machine.

If you then consider the extent to which the interface design metaphors that the Mac embodied were embraced by the dominant Microsoft Windows operating system, well, you're left with quite a legacy, all things considered.

Of the many tales that surround the individuals responsible for springing the Mac on the world, an anecdote about Raskin is a personal favourite.

When Raskin resigned his associate professorship at the University of California, San Diego, he chose an intriguing way to hand in his notice, as he recounted on his website:

"When I resigned I got into a hot air balloon in the middle of Revelle Plaza and flew over the Chancellor's residence playing my sopranino recorder so that he would hear the sound. He came out and I yelled down that I was resigning and floated off. I was an art professor at the time and it seemed arty to leave that way."

It's easy to see how a polymath, schooled in music, human interface design and technology, combined with a romantic spirit, helped to shape the creation and evolution of the Mac.

* Jef Raskin died at his home in Pacifica, California on 26 February. A statement issued by his family said he had recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. More information on his research, work and interests is available here.