6 ms·

Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)

123 points by tylerdane 4mo ago

tylerdane 4mo ago
Fav quote: "I have made changes in the world that are beyond what most people thought was possible, and I hope that my judgment continues to be good as to what is possible to change and what is not."
NetMageSCW 4mo ago
That interviewer really seemed to be ignorant of the facts as Jeff knows them and asked questions that kept annoying him. Left the strong impression that Jeff thought him an idiot and his questions leave the reader feeling Jeff might be right.
- nlawalker 4mo ago
  Yeah that's a really stiff interview to publish, it reads like the interviewer pulled up to him while he was eating lunch and peppered him with questions.
  - erickhill 4mo ago
    Sometimes these interviews are done via a single email filled with questions and are not performed in-person, so the answer of a question isn't always carried forward into future questions, which can seem awkward from afar.
- sowbug 4mo ago
  It might have been an emailed list of questions, rather than a real-time conversation.
  - bombcar 4mo ago
    It was pretty obviously a one-way street; likely emailed.
- mewse-hn 4mo ago
  It's not a great interview and it's sad that Raskin passed a month later. > JW: The original Mac was to be sold for $600. When it finally arrived it cost $2,500 and today the cheapest Mac is $699. Is this a disappointment to you? > JR: Which? the $2,500, the $699? It was never supposed to be $600. Like.. terrible question, annoyed interview subject.
Someone 4mo ago
https://folklore.org/The_Father_of_The_Macintosh.html https://folklore.org/The_Father_of_The_Macintosh.html: “There's no doubt that Jef was the creator of the Macintosh project at Apple, and that his articulate vision of an exceptionally easy to use, low cost, high volume appliance computer got the ball rolling, and remained near the heart of the project long after Jef left the company. 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. But there is also no escaping the fact that the Macintosh that we know and love is very different than the computer that Jef wanted to build, so much so that he is much more like an eccentric great uncle than the Macintosh's father. Jef did not want to incorporate what became the two most definitive aspects of Macintosh technology - the Motorola 68000 microprocessor and the mouse pointing device. Jef preferred the 6809, a cheaper but weaker processor which only had 16 bits of address space and would have been obsolete in just a year or two, since it couldn't address more than 64Kbytes. He was dead set against the mouse as well, preferring dedicated meta-keys to do the pointing. He became increasingly alienated from the team, eventually leaving entirely in the summer of 1981, when we were still just getting started, and the final product utilitized very few of the ideas in the Book of Macintosh. In fact, if the name of the project had changed after Steve took over in January 1981, and it almost did (see Bicycle), there wouldn't be much reason to correlate it with his ideas at all.”
- latexr 4mo ago
  That was my exact thought when I read the submission’s title. Thank you for finding and posting the article. This interview does seem to have a comment about it: > Andy [Hertzfeld, a major developer on the early Mac team], unfortunately, has not generally gone back to the original documents, and he’s interviewed lots of people about the history of the Mac, but not me. His website is, as a result, full of errors.
- adrian_b 4mo ago
  In TFA, Jef Raskin claims that the story about the mouse is not entirely correct: JR: No. I designed it to be graphical from the ground up. But the text portions of the interface, which I also cared about, would have been cleaner. People have put together my dislike of the mouse (confusing dislike for a particular input device with dislike for graphic input devices in general; I personally prefer trackballs and tablets) and my careful attention to text handling to a false legend of my wanting a text-based machine. Andy [Hertzfeld, a major developer on the early Mac team], unfortunately, has not generally gone back to the original documents, and he’s interviewed lots of people about the history of the Mac, but not me. His website is, as a result, full of errors.
latexr 4mo ago
> I would say that in another decade, at least some of what I’m working on will be taken for granted by millions of computer users. It’s been over a decade since the interview. Anyone familiar with anything Raskin was working then that is ubiquitous now?
- a4isms 4mo ago
  Jef was a huge proponent of incremental search. That hasn't become mainstream-ubiquitous, but it is certainly code-editor-ubiquitous. Jef being an extremist, he wanted incremental search as the only mechanism for moving the cursor. I have tried editing using only incremental search, and it was awful right up until the moment when I reached for it first instead of wanting a mouse or arrow key and then remembering I was only supposed to use incremental search. From that moment on, I sailed along just fine. Does that mean it might have "won?" Certainly not, but all the same... Success in software design is absolutely not any kind of meritocracy outside of the tautological "If it won, it must have merit, winning is the metric for merit."
  - jdougan 4mo ago
    I'm curious as to how time efficient that actually was.
- andai 4mo ago
  The interview is from 2005. Jef passed away a month later.
- 47282847 4mo ago
  His research work was pretty foundational. Highly recommend his book! It’s timeless, especially since he did his explorations in a time before users were already “poisoned” by existing concepts and expectations - which is also a topic in his book.
pavlov 4mo ago
The date in the title should be 2005, not 2013. At the end of the article it reads: > This article was first published on 2005.01.19. It’s also evidenced by the reference to the “new iMac G5.”
- ralfd 4mo ago
  Raskin also died a month later at 26. Februar 2005 (cancer).
andai 4mo ago
See also Jef's excellent book, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface
GeekyBear 4mo ago
Jef did go on to create a computer along the lines of his original vision after leaving Apple. > The Canon Cat used a text-based user interface, without any pointer, mouse, icons, or graphics. All data was seen as a long "stream" of text broken into several pages. Instead of using a traditional command-line interface or menu system, the Cat used its special keyboard, with commands activated by holding down a "Use Front" key and pressing another key. https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat It was nothing like the Macintosh Apple shipped.
- jimbosis 4mo ago
  If you want to get some flavor of what editing on the Canon Cat may have felt like, especially the LEAP keys, try Jasper and/or bitters. Jasper: https://lab.alexanderobenauer.com/jasper/ https://lab.alexanderobenauer.com/jasper/ https://lab.alexanderobenauer.com/updates/the-jasper-report https://lab.alexanderobenauer.com/updates/the-jasper-report bitters: https://m15o.ichi.city/bitters/ https://m15o.ichi.city/bitters/ https://nightfall.city/nex/in/m15o/projects/bitters/ https://nightfall.city/nex/in/m15o/projects/bitters/ (very similar to the link above, but Nex is a neat protocol...) https://sr.ht/~m15o/bitters/ https://sr.ht/~m15o/bitters/ Furthermore, Internet Archive hosts a runnable Canon Cat Emulation. I believe this means it is available in MAME as well. https://archive.org/details/canoncat https://archive.org/details/canoncat
- kickingvegas 4mo ago
  After seeing a video of the Canon Cat in action, I thought “so, this is a lot like Emacs”.
  - Animats 4mo ago
    It is, kind of. The Canon Cat is a good text editor. That's about all it does. When Raskin was active, there was a whole industry selling "word processors", special purpose computers that just did text processing. Wang and IBM were the biggest makers. The IBM PC was descended from the IBM Displaywriter and used the same monitor. So at the time, word processing looked like the core desktop computer function. So Raskin perfected the word processor interface. What he didn't get was that computing was not going to stop at word processors.
coldtea 4mo ago
Visionary, yes. Behind the Macintosh project, yes. Behind the Mac, as in, behind the Mac as it actually shipped, no. His ideas had little to do with it - it was almost entirely stuff designed by others when he was out of the project.
- lysace 4mo ago
  This concept of a story has been on HN so many times. It always starts with this technically correct but actually misleading headline fragment. Misleading clickbait works, even here. Every time.
a4isms 4mo ago
In addition to his book, I am constantly linking to "Intuitive Equals Familiar:" https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html A short must-read for people designing (via prompt or any other tool) user experiences. It is timeless (so far!)
shae 4mo ago
I got to meet Jef Raskin in the early 2000s when he gave a talk in Sweden. He was a fun person to chat with, lots of great ideas and the drive to work out the details.
labrador 4mo ago
Jobs did the right thing, which was to make an affordable Lisa for home computing. The simplicity of the mouse was essential. It's sounds like Jef had other ideas.
- adrian_b 4mo ago
  Jef wanted a trackball instead of a mouse. The claim that he did not want a pointing device is false. That would have made little difference for a Mackintosh user. The hardware of a trackball is exactly equivalent with that of a mouse, neither is simpler than the other. (Optical mice without rolling balls have appeared only decades later.) I have actually used trackballs instead of mice for a few years, and I have greatly preferred them to mice or touchpads. Trackballs tend to be slower than mice, because you normally move them with the thumb or with the fingers, instead of moving the entire hand, but they are usually more comfortable than mice. Nowadays, since several years ago, I use as the graphic pointing devices small graphic tablets configured in the relative mode instead of their default absolute mode. These are greatly superior from all points of view, speed, accuracy, comfort, to both mice and trackballs and to any other kinds of pointing devices, like trackpoints or touchpads. So Jef Raskin had good reasons to question which is the best graphic pointing device, instead of just accepting the mouse because that happened to be the choice made at Xerox. Based on my experience on how much better a stylus is than any kind of mouse, I consider the use of mice for pointing devices as a great historical mistake in the use of computers. I deeply regret that I have used mice for decades, instead of trying to find something better since the beginning. The Apple Mackintosh is a significant culprit for the undeserved popularity of mice.
  - taneq 4mo ago
    How is your ‘small tablet’ approach different to a trackpad? Do you use the tablet screen somehow? Sounds interesting!
    - adrian_b 4mo ago
      It has no resemblance whatsoever with a trackpad. I use Wacom Intuos S graphic tablets, on Linux. These are cheap tablets without screens, with a USB or Bluetooth interface. These tablets have the same size as a traditional mouse pad, so they do not take more size on the desk than a mouse. The stylus is extremely light, so I can keep it between my fingers while touch typing with all fingers on the keyboard. Thus I can transition between typing and pointing much faster than with a mouse, where I have to grip the mouse or release it. I configure the tablet in "Relative" mode, where the operating system sees it as a mouse and there is no difference in behavior between it and a mouse. I configure the stylus to emit a "left click" when I touch the tablet with its tip. The stylus has 2 buttons that can be pressed with your index. I configure one to be "right click" and the other to be "double left click". You can choose any other behaviors. Holding the stylus is much, much more comfortable than holding a mouse, because of the natural position of the hand. Moving the cursor with the stylus is much faster than with a mouse. I can move it across the screen from corner to corner instantaneously, because the stylus is much lighter than a mouse, and there is no friction, since it does not touch the tablet, unless you use it to select an area. The positioning accuracy is much better than with a mouse. If you desire so, you can do handwriting, e.g. signatures, or make drawings with it, which of course is not surprising as this is supposed to be a graphic tablet. I tried this initially only hoping for a better comfort, because my hand was hurting from the excessive use of mouse all day long. But then I discovered that not only it is very comfortable, but also much faster and more accurate than a mouse can be. Therefore I do not intend to ever use a mouse again. Trackpads are more comfortable than mice, but they are much slower, so they are not competitive for things like drawing electronics schematics, which I do from time to time. While trackpads, like touchscreens, do not have the inertia problem of a mouse, it is absolutely impossible to move your fingertips with the speed with which you can move the tip of a stylus, which amplifies the amplitude of your finger movements. There are too few programs which know to use "mouse gestures" for the user interface, e.g. some expensive CAD/EDA programs or the Web browser Vivaldi. Mouse gestures are already better than any trackpad gestures, but when you use a stylus they become even better, as they are pretty much the same movements as in handwriting.
elzbardico 4mo ago
I think that a Jef Raskins Mac would have been a commercial disaster. It would be a nice computer designed for a client: Jef Raskins. He may be the man who started the Macintosh project, but Steve Jobs saved the Mac from him.
- adrian_b 4mo ago
  The myth that the original Mackintosh was not intended to have a graphic display with a pointing device is debunked in TFA. The only technical detail that we know about the original Mackintosh that was a mistake was the choice of the MC6809 CPU, for reduced costs. MC6809 was a very nice CPU and for many programs the Intel 8088 CPU from the IBM PC was slower than a 2 MHz MC6809, but MC6809 was limited to 64 kB of memory, so the original Mackintosh would have become obsolete very quickly. This is not enough to allow anyone to claim that it would have been a commercial disaster, but it would certainly would have had a short lifetime and then there would have been significant costs to port any software to a replacement CPU with a greater address space.
yulia_dev_la 4mo ago
[dead]
IOT_Apprentice 4mo ago
Way back when I worked at HP in the Software Development Technology Lab, we invited a series of speakers to talk about their view of technology. We had folks such as Jef Raskin, Ted Nelson, Douglas Englebart, James Burke. All quite fascinating & inspiring people. Jef brought a Cannon Cat and discussed his views on User Interfaces & more. The MPE OS engineering guys were rather sarcastic in hearing his methodology around the OS approach of the CAT.
sungjinwo0 4mo ago
[flagged]

123 points by tylerdane 4mo ago

Fav quote: "I have made changes in the world that are beyond what most people thought was possible, and I hope that my judgment continues to be good as to what is possible to change and what is not."

NetMageSCW 4mo ago

That interviewer really seemed to be ignorant of the facts as Jeff knows them and asked questions that kept annoying him. Left the strong impression that Jeff thought him an idiot and his questions leave the reader feeling Jeff might be right.

nlawalker 4mo ago
Yeah that's a really stiff interview to publish, it reads like the interviewer pulled up to him while he was eating lunch and peppered him with questions.
- erickhill 4mo ago
  Sometimes these interviews are done via a single email filled with questions and are not performed in-person, so the answer of a question isn't always carried forward into future questions, which can seem awkward from afar.
sowbug 4mo ago
It might have been an emailed list of questions, rather than a real-time conversation.
- bombcar 4mo ago
  It was pretty obviously a one-way street; likely emailed.
mewse-hn 4mo ago
It's not a great interview and it's sad that Raskin passed a month later. > JW: The original Mac was to be sold for $600. When it finally arrived it cost $2,500 and today the cheapest Mac is $699. Is this a disappointment to you? > JR: Which? the $2,500, the $699? It was never supposed to be $600. Like.. terrible question, annoyed interview subject.

Someone 4mo ago

https://folklore.org/The_Father_of_The_Macintosh.html https://folklore.org/The_Father_of_The_Macintosh.html: “There's no doubt that Jef was the creator of the Macintosh project at Apple, and that his articulate vision of an exceptionally easy to use, low cost, high volume appliance computer got the ball rolling, and remained near the heart of the project long after Jef left the company. 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. But there is also no escaping the fact that the Macintosh that we know and love is very different than the computer that Jef wanted to build, so much so that he is much more like an eccentric great uncle than the Macintosh's father. Jef did not want to incorporate what became the two most definitive aspects of Macintosh technology - the Motorola 68000 microprocessor and the mouse pointing device. Jef preferred the 6809, a cheaper but weaker processor which only had 16 bits of address space and would have been obsolete in just a year or two, since it couldn't address more than 64Kbytes. He was dead set against the mouse as well, preferring dedicated meta-keys to do the pointing. He became increasingly alienated from the team, eventually leaving entirely in the summer of 1981, when we were still just getting started, and the final product utilitized very few of the ideas in the Book of Macintosh. In fact, if the name of the project had changed after Steve took over in January 1981, and it almost did (see Bicycle), there wouldn't be much reason to correlate it with his ideas at all.”

latexr 4mo ago
That was my exact thought when I read the submission’s title. Thank you for finding and posting the article. This interview does seem to have a comment about it: > Andy [Hertzfeld, a major developer on the early Mac team], unfortunately, has not generally gone back to the original documents, and he’s interviewed lots of people about the history of the Mac, but not me. His website is, as a result, full of errors.
adrian_b 4mo ago
In TFA, Jef Raskin claims that the story about the mouse is not entirely correct: JR: No. I designed it to be graphical from the ground up. But the text portions of the interface, which I also cared about, would have been cleaner. People have put together my dislike of the mouse (confusing dislike for a particular input device with dislike for graphic input devices in general; I personally prefer trackballs and tablets) and my careful attention to text handling to a false legend of my wanting a text-based machine. Andy [Hertzfeld, a major developer on the early Mac team], unfortunately, has not generally gone back to the original documents, and he’s interviewed lots of people about the history of the Mac, but not me. His website is, as a result, full of errors.

latexr 4mo ago

> I would say that in another decade, at least some of what I’m working on will be taken for granted by millions of computer users. It’s been over a decade since the interview. Anyone familiar with anything Raskin was working then that is ubiquitous now?

a4isms 4mo ago
Jef was a huge proponent of incremental search. That hasn't become mainstream-ubiquitous, but it is certainly code-editor-ubiquitous. Jef being an extremist, he wanted incremental search as the only mechanism for moving the cursor. I have tried editing using only incremental search, and it was awful right up until the moment when I reached for it first instead of wanting a mouse or arrow key and then remembering I was only supposed to use incremental search. From that moment on, I sailed along just fine. Does that mean it might have "won?" Certainly not, but all the same... Success in software design is absolutely not any kind of meritocracy outside of the tautological "If it won, it must have merit, winning is the metric for merit."
- jdougan 4mo ago
  I'm curious as to how time efficient that actually was.
andai 4mo ago
The interview is from 2005. Jef passed away a month later.
47282847 4mo ago
His research work was pretty foundational. Highly recommend his book! It’s timeless, especially since he did his explorations in a time before users were already “poisoned” by existing concepts and expectations - which is also a topic in his book.

pavlov 4mo ago

The date in the title should be 2005, not 2013. At the end of the article it reads: > This article was first published on 2005.01.19. It’s also evidenced by the reference to the “new iMac G5.”

ralfd 4mo ago
Raskin also died a month later at 26. Februar 2005 (cancer).

andai 4mo ago

See also Jef's excellent book, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface

GeekyBear 4mo ago

Jef did go on to create a computer along the lines of his original vision after leaving Apple. > The Canon Cat used a text-based user interface, without any pointer, mouse, icons, or graphics. All data was seen as a long "stream" of text broken into several pages. Instead of using a traditional command-line interface or menu system, the Cat used its special keyboard, with commands activated by holding down a "Use Front" key and pressing another key. https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat It was nothing like the Macintosh Apple shipped.

jimbosis 4mo ago
If you want to get some flavor of what editing on the Canon Cat may have felt like, especially the LEAP keys, try Jasper and/or bitters. Jasper: https://lab.alexanderobenauer.com/jasper/ https://lab.alexanderobenauer.com/jasper/ https://lab.alexanderobenauer.com/updates/the-jasper-report https://lab.alexanderobenauer.com/updates/the-jasper-report bitters: https://m15o.ichi.city/bitters/ https://m15o.ichi.city/bitters/ https://nightfall.city/nex/in/m15o/projects/bitters/ https://nightfall.city/nex/in/m15o/projects/bitters/ (very similar to the link above, but Nex is a neat protocol...) https://sr.ht/~m15o/bitters/ https://sr.ht/~m15o/bitters/ Furthermore, Internet Archive hosts a runnable Canon Cat Emulation. I believe this means it is available in MAME as well. https://archive.org/details/canoncat https://archive.org/details/canoncat
kickingvegas 4mo ago
After seeing a video of the Canon Cat in action, I thought “so, this is a lot like Emacs”.
- Animats 4mo ago
  It is, kind of. The Canon Cat is a good text editor. That's about all it does. When Raskin was active, there was a whole industry selling "word processors", special purpose computers that just did text processing. Wang and IBM were the biggest makers. The IBM PC was descended from the IBM Displaywriter and used the same monitor. So at the time, word processing looked like the core desktop computer function. So Raskin perfected the word processor interface. What he didn't get was that computing was not going to stop at word processors.

coldtea 4mo ago

Visionary, yes. Behind the Macintosh project, yes. Behind the Mac, as in, behind the Mac as it actually shipped, no. His ideas had little to do with it - it was almost entirely stuff designed by others when he was out of the project.

lysace 4mo ago
This concept of a story has been on HN so many times. It always starts with this technically correct but actually misleading headline fragment. Misleading clickbait works, even here. Every time.

a4isms 4mo ago

In addition to his book, I am constantly linking to "Intuitive Equals Familiar:" https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html A short must-read for people designing (via prompt or any other tool) user experiences. It is timeless (so far!)

shae 4mo ago

I got to meet Jef Raskin in the early 2000s when he gave a talk in Sweden. He was a fun person to chat with, lots of great ideas and the drive to work out the details.

labrador 4mo ago

Jobs did the right thing, which was to make an affordable Lisa for home computing. The simplicity of the mouse was essential. It's sounds like Jef had other ideas.

adrian_b 4mo ago
Jef wanted a trackball instead of a mouse. The claim that he did not want a pointing device is false. That would have made little difference for a Mackintosh user. The hardware of a trackball is exactly equivalent with that of a mouse, neither is simpler than the other. (Optical mice without rolling balls have appeared only decades later.) I have actually used trackballs instead of mice for a few years, and I have greatly preferred them to mice or touchpads. Trackballs tend to be slower than mice, because you normally move them with the thumb or with the fingers, instead of moving the entire hand, but they are usually more comfortable than mice. Nowadays, since several years ago, I use as the graphic pointing devices small graphic tablets configured in the relative mode instead of their default absolute mode. These are greatly superior from all points of view, speed, accuracy, comfort, to both mice and trackballs and to any other kinds of pointing devices, like trackpoints or touchpads. So Jef Raskin had good reasons to question which is the best graphic pointing device, instead of just accepting the mouse because that happened to be the choice made at Xerox. Based on my experience on how much better a stylus is than any kind of mouse, I consider the use of mice for pointing devices as a great historical mistake in the use of computers. I deeply regret that I have used mice for decades, instead of trying to find something better since the beginning. The Apple Mackintosh is a significant culprit for the undeserved popularity of mice.
- taneq 4mo ago
  How is your ‘small tablet’ approach different to a trackpad? Do you use the tablet screen somehow? Sounds interesting!
  - adrian_b 4mo ago
    It has no resemblance whatsoever with a trackpad. I use Wacom Intuos S graphic tablets, on Linux. These are cheap tablets without screens, with a USB or Bluetooth interface. These tablets have the same size as a traditional mouse pad, so they do not take more size on the desk than a mouse. The stylus is extremely light, so I can keep it between my fingers while touch typing with all fingers on the keyboard. Thus I can transition between typing and pointing much faster than with a mouse, where I have to grip the mouse or release it. I configure the tablet in "Relative" mode, where the operating system sees it as a mouse and there is no difference in behavior between it and a mouse. I configure the stylus to emit a "left click" when I touch the tablet with its tip. The stylus has 2 buttons that can be pressed with your index. I configure one to be "right click" and the other to be "double left click". You can choose any other behaviors. Holding the stylus is much, much more comfortable than holding a mouse, because of the natural position of the hand. Moving the cursor with the stylus is much faster than with a mouse. I can move it across the screen from corner to corner instantaneously, because the stylus is much lighter than a mouse, and there is no friction, since it does not touch the tablet, unless you use it to select an area. The positioning accuracy is much better than with a mouse. If you desire so, you can do handwriting, e.g. signatures, or make drawings with it, which of course is not surprising as this is supposed to be a graphic tablet. I tried this initially only hoping for a better comfort, because my hand was hurting from the excessive use of mouse all day long. But then I discovered that not only it is very comfortable, but also much faster and more accurate than a mouse can be. Therefore I do not intend to ever use a mouse again. Trackpads are more comfortable than mice, but they are much slower, so they are not competitive for things like drawing electronics schematics, which I do from time to time. While trackpads, like touchscreens, do not have the inertia problem of a mouse, it is absolutely impossible to move your fingertips with the speed with which you can move the tip of a stylus, which amplifies the amplitude of your finger movements. There are too few programs which know to use "mouse gestures" for the user interface, e.g. some expensive CAD/EDA programs or the Web browser Vivaldi. Mouse gestures are already better than any trackpad gestures, but when you use a stylus they become even better, as they are pretty much the same movements as in handwriting.

elzbardico 4mo ago

I think that a Jef Raskins Mac would have been a commercial disaster. It would be a nice computer designed for a client: Jef Raskins. He may be the man who started the Macintosh project, but Steve Jobs saved the Mac from him.

adrian_b 4mo ago
The myth that the original Mackintosh was not intended to have a graphic display with a pointing device is debunked in TFA. The only technical detail that we know about the original Mackintosh that was a mistake was the choice of the MC6809 CPU, for reduced costs. MC6809 was a very nice CPU and for many programs the Intel 8088 CPU from the IBM PC was slower than a 2 MHz MC6809, but MC6809 was limited to 64 kB of memory, so the original Mackintosh would have become obsolete very quickly. This is not enough to allow anyone to claim that it would have been a commercial disaster, but it would certainly would have had a short lifetime and then there would have been significant costs to port any software to a replacement CPU with a greater address space.

yulia_dev_la 4mo ago

[dead]

IOT_Apprentice 4mo ago

Way back when I worked at HP in the Software Development Technology Lab, we invited a series of speakers to talk about their view of technology. We had folks such as Jef Raskin, Ted Nelson, Douglas Englebart, James Burke. All quite fascinating & inspiring people. Jef brought a Cannon Cat and discussed his views on User Interfaces & more. The MPE OS engineering guys were rather sarcastic in hearing his methodology around the OS approach of the CAT.

sungjinwo0 4mo ago

[flagged]