My reading of folklore.org jives with what you're saying. The Mac as originally imagined by Raskin was not the Mac that eventually shipped (for better or worse)

My reading of folklore.org jives with what you're saying. The Mac as originally imagined by Raskin was not the Mac that eventually shipped (for better or worse). Considering Raskin's ideas about user interaction as "out there" is a matter of perspective. Touch screen interfaces that are now common today were once considered "out there". His love affair with the Canon Cat wasn't just a personal obsession. He made (what I considered to be) a group of well reasoned arguments about why it was so good based on the concepts it brought into reality. Off the top of my head I can recall automatic file saving (with no consideration to the file system) being one such argument. This feature will be shipping in the next release of OS X (Lion). If Raskin's ideas in the Humane Interface were "out there", then I take that phrase to be synonymous with "avant garde". The zoom UI he talks about in another chapter (and what the OS X app Raskin has attempted to implement) seems like a strong candidate for a general data exploration and discovery UI. What he put forth in the book was conceptual, and no one has yet made a commercially or critically appealing implementation. That doesn't mean it won't happen. It just mean it hasn't happened.