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> 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 ex
by 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 agoFrom 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 agoThank 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