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Note that Jobs didn’t create Macintosh. Having found himself without a power base within Apple, he looked around for a project and found Jef Raskin working away
by braythwayt 7y ago
Note that Jobs didn’t create Macintosh. Having found himself without a power base within Apple, he looked around for a project and found Jef Raskin working away on creating an information appliance designed for “people first.”
Raskin’s vision was that it be low-cost and emphasize the user experience. But he and Jobs had very different ideas about how to accomplish this. Raskin did not want to create a computer people couldn’t afford, and his ideas for a new user experience were based on things like incremental search, not shipping an expensive (for the time) peripheral like a mouse.
Likewise, a bitmapped display and the cimputing power to make it work added too much cost for the computer to be an appliance in Jef’s mind, so he eschewed the kind of things Apple was doing with LISA, based on Xerox’s Star.
However, Jobs may have lost his power in the boardroom, but he outranked Raskin, and he pushed Raskin out. The Macintosh became another LISA, but without the overhead created by a design team trying to recreate much of the richness of the Star.
The Macintosh that shipped was less expensive than LISA, but certainly not inexpensive enough to be an appliance. They were way more expensive than The PCs of the day, and might well have fizzled had Aldus not shipped PageMaker and created a “killer app” for Macintosh the way VisiCalc created a killer app for early PCs.
The story Apple likes to tell about Jobs creating Macintosh is entertaining, but the backstory is much more educational for those of us working in mid-sized or larger companies, with all of the conflicting requirements, tradeoffs, and yes, politics.
Plenty more of that kind if thing at http://folklore.org/ http://folklore.org/
There’s a collection of stories about Jef Raskin. He was an iconoclast with an insanely focused vision:
https://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&characters=Jef%20Raskin https://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&ch...
- kick 7y agoI was aware of this! It's always been a very interesting part of consumer technology's history for me.
- braythwayt 7y agoYeah. The story of LISA and before that, Apple III are also fascinating. A hit product like Apple II buys a company a lot of lottery tickets for coming up with another hit.
- kalleboo 7y agoAnd Jef Raskin eventually got to create his vision, in the form of the Canon Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat
- int_19h 7y agoSo wait - did the guy invent the FN key? And does FN on modern keyboards stand for "FroNt", rather than "FuNction"?
- geocar 7y agoI don't think so. The space-cadet keyboard had a FRONT key and it predates the canon cat by at least a few years: It literally referred to the characters on the front of the keycaps (as opposed to the top).
- webboynews 7y agoHis son is also a UX guru and created the ultimate power tool, enso- a launcher.
- hboon 7y agoAnd he worked on Jawbone UP.
- braythwayt 7y agoFor those unfamiliar, that’s Aza Raskin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aza_Raskin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aza_Raskin
- achow 7y agoIt is true that Jef Raskin set the vision for Macintosh as an extremely friendly and approachable computing machine. However, there is other anecdote which says.. Andy Herzfeld, one of the Macintosh’s developers, says that Raskin is “much more like an eccentric great uncle than the Macintosh’s father,” However, ..He also deserves ample credit for putting together the extraordinary initial team that created the computer, recruiting former student Bill Atkinson to Apple and then hiring amazing individuals like Burrell Smith, Bud Tribble, Joanna Hoffman and Brian Howard for the Macintosh team. https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/October-2011/Steve-Jobs-Jef-Raskin-and-the-Humane-Interface/ https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/October-...
- braythwayt 7y agoThe folklore.org links I provided go into this and more. As I’m about to type into another reply in this thread... I think the conclusion to be drawn from discussions like this is that although narcissists like to suggest they and they alone provided the “magic spark” that make projects successful, it is an entire team of people who actually create revolutionary products. The business press—and society on average—love the myth of the visionary entrepreneur, but upon close inspection, success has many parents.
- simonh 7y ago>Note that Jobs didn’t create Macintosh. You create the impression Raskin created the Macintosh instead, but Raskin was working on a text menu based system nothing like the Macintosh so that just flat out doesn't fly. Raskin assembled the Macintosh team, but the creative vision for the Mac certainly didn't come from Raskin.
- braythwayt 7y agoThe folklore.org links I provided go into this and more. As typed into another reply in this thread... I think the conclusion to be drawn from discussions like this is that although narcissists like to suggest they and they alone provided the “magic spark” that make projects successful, it is an entire team of people who actually create revolutionary products. The business press—and society on average—love the myth of the visionary entrepreneur, but upon close inspection, success has many parents.