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> Jef Raskin, an early Apple employee who wrote the manual for the Apple ][, had visited PARC in 1973. He believed that GUIs were the future. Raskin managed to

by gumby 4y ago

> Jef Raskin, an early Apple employee who wrote the manual for the Apple ][, had visited PARC in 1973. He believed that GUIs were the future. Raskin managed to persuade the Lisa project leader to change the computer into a GUI machine. However, he couldn’t convince Jobs, who thought Raskin and Xerox were incompetent. I knew Jef a little and I think "incompetent" was unfair (OK it's allegedly Steve jobs who said it so all his statement/opinions were dialed up to 11). Jef was thoughtful, but I would say some of his ideas were utopian and he was somewhat ineffective, probably because of that. Which leads to: > After being kicked off the Lisa team, Jobs strong-armed his way into Raskin’s Macintosh project. Raskin loved GUIs, but he had different ideas for his computer... The project was indeed Jef's, but his vision was very text-oriented. I consider the actual Mac to be a complete reboot of what he was working on (but I was not there and perhaps others who were would disagree -- hopefully someone who knows will comment).

GeekyBear 4y ago
The Cannon Cat was Jef's vision, and it didn't even have a GUI. > Canon Cat is primarily the creation of Jef Raskin, the originator of the Macintosh project at Apple. After leaving the company in 1982 and founding Information Appliance, Inc., he began designing a new computer closer to his original vision of an inexpensive, utilitarian "people's computer". It features a text user interface, not making use of any pointer (mouse), icons, or graphics. All data are seen as a long "stream" of text broken into several pages. Instead of using a traditional command line interface or menu system, the Cat makes use of its special keyboard, with commands being activated by holding down a "Use Front" key and pressing another key. The Cat also uses special "Leap keys", which, when held down, allows the user to incrementally search for strings of characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat
- gumby 4y ago
  That wikipedia page links to a great note by Jef on his vision, which is what I remember him describing on a couple of occasions. He was working on it pretty much to the end of his life as far as I know. https://www.apple-history.com/gui_raskin2 https://www.apple-history.com/gui_raskin2
II2II 4y ago
> The project was indeed Jef's, but his vision was very text-oriented. From the descriptions I have read, I get the impression that text-oriented is both an excellent description and somewhat misleading. I don't know if you knew him or his work of that era well enough, but it's still worth asking: is it a case of Raskin viewing computers as fundamentally text-oriented, or a case of him viewing people's interaction with computers as fundamentally text-oriented (i.e. through a keyboard). The reason why I bring this up is because people seem to have very particular views of what text-oriented means these days. For some it will be the command driven interface of the Unix shell. For others, it will be memories of MS-DOS applications (many of which adopted WIMP-like metaphors in the later days). Neither perspective seems to reflect Raskin's vision.
- gumby 4y ago
  From talking with him I don't know that it meant a command-line itself (I have no idea), but it was very much focused on using the keyboard to control reading and navigation, as opposed to Mac's (of the 80s) very mouse-centred interface (remember it didn't even have arrow keys). There is a document he wrote for Apple all about his ideas of what the mac should be, surely findable somewhere with some google-fu. I assume jobs just took one look at it and chucked it straight into the bin. He was an interesting thinker. GeekyBear mentions the Cannon Cat, and posts a link that goes down an interesting rathole.
  - II2II 4y ago
    Thank you for pointing out the articles. Along the way, I found several evenings of reading that should cover Raskin's ideas for the Macintosh in much greater detail: https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/earlymac.html https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/earlymac.html

by gumby 4y ago

GeekyBear 4y ago

The Cannon Cat was Jef's vision, and it didn't even have a GUI. > Canon Cat is primarily the creation of Jef Raskin, the originator of the Macintosh project at Apple. After leaving the company in 1982 and founding Information Appliance, Inc., he began designing a new computer closer to his original vision of an inexpensive, utilitarian "people's computer". It features a text user interface, not making use of any pointer (mouse), icons, or graphics. All data are seen as a long "stream" of text broken into several pages. Instead of using a traditional command line interface or menu system, the Cat makes use of its special keyboard, with commands being activated by holding down a "Use Front" key and pressing another key. The Cat also uses special "Leap keys", which, when held down, allows the user to incrementally search for strings of characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat

gumby 4y ago
That wikipedia page links to a great note by Jef on his vision, which is what I remember him describing on a couple of occasions. He was working on it pretty much to the end of his life as far as I know. https://www.apple-history.com/gui_raskin2 https://www.apple-history.com/gui_raskin2

II2II 4y ago

> The project was indeed Jef's, but his vision was very text-oriented. From the descriptions I have read, I get the impression that text-oriented is both an excellent description and somewhat misleading. I don't know if you knew him or his work of that era well enough, but it's still worth asking: is it a case of Raskin viewing computers as fundamentally text-oriented, or a case of him viewing people's interaction with computers as fundamentally text-oriented (i.e. through a keyboard). The reason why I bring this up is because people seem to have very particular views of what text-oriented means these days. For some it will be the command driven interface of the Unix shell. For others, it will be memories of MS-DOS applications (many of which adopted WIMP-like metaphors in the later days). Neither perspective seems to reflect Raskin's vision.

gumby 4y ago
From talking with him I don't know that it meant a command-line itself (I have no idea), but it was very much focused on using the keyboard to control reading and navigation, as opposed to Mac's (of the 80s) very mouse-centred interface (remember it didn't even have arrow keys). There is a document he wrote for Apple all about his ideas of what the mac should be, surely findable somewhere with some google-fu. I assume jobs just took one look at it and chucked it straight into the bin. He was an interesting thinker. GeekyBear mentions the Cannon Cat, and posts a link that goes down an interesting rathole.
- II2II 4y ago
  Thank you for pointing out the articles. Along the way, I found several evenings of reading that should cover Raskin's ideas for the Macintosh in much greater detail: https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/earlymac.html https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/earlymac.html