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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

by 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.
- WillAdams 4mo ago
  Part of this was due to Steve Jobs insisting on no arrow keys on the O.G. Mac's keyboard so as to force usage of the mouse.
- simondotau 4mo ago
  History is written by the victors. In this case it’s completely fine, as Raskin’s “corrections” don’t really amount to much, and certainly would have led to a path where Macintosh was just another abandoned experiment like the Apple III. Perhaps in this alternate universe, a substantially reworked “Lisa II” might have been Apple’s long-lived computing platform.
  - II2II 4mo ago
    The corrections may not amount to much, but there is no reason to believe that his version would be a failed experiment like the Apple III or the Lisa would have taken it's place. Part of the magic of the Macintosh was the simplicity of the hardware. In that respect, it was much closer to the Apple II than the Apple III or Lisa. Consumers may not think much about what's inside the case, but it matters when it comes to manufacturing costs and that translates into the cost for consumers. While the original Macintosh was by no means cheap, it was about half the cost of the Apple III and a quarter of the cost of the Lisa. Heck, even the adoption of the Macintosh was slow because of its price. Maybe a less expensive 6809 based Macintosh would have had more success in the market, at least early on. It's also too easy to read too much into the failure of the Canon Cat. The Canon Cat was introduced years later. User expectations were starting to solidify around the GUI at that point. (Then again, success was not guaranteed. Lacking compatibility with the Apple II would have held it back. Especially so after the introduction of the IBM PC since the IBM PC had IBM backing it.) I also think the adoption of the GUI for consumer computers would have been delayed considerably without the Macintosh 128k. Early machines that supported a GUI tended to be expensive. Early versions of Windows were crude. The only real outliers in that respect were the Atari and the Amiga. Would they have supported a GUI without Apple taking that first step? It's hard to tell.
    - 4mo ago
jnaina 4mo ago
Jef's vision for a high volume appliance computer was eventually realized in the Canon Cat which he co-created with Canon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat Vision may spark greatness, but execution is what makes it real. The Hacker News crowd can debate endlessly about who conceived the Macintosh while dumping on Steve Jobs. But Steve Jobs did what ultimately mattered: he shipped.
uxhacker 4mo ago
But the part that should not be forgot is Jef Raskin’s book The Humane Interface. Many of the ideas in the book are only now implementable with the arrival of AI. Also he defined the difference between computers and humans as computers been precise and accurate and humans as vague, but more flexible. We have now had a paradigm shift in that ai is now the flexible interface that sometimes hallucinates.

by Someone 4mo ago

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.

WillAdams 4mo ago
Part of this was due to Steve Jobs insisting on no arrow keys on the O.G. Mac's keyboard so as to force usage of the mouse.
simondotau 4mo ago
History is written by the victors. In this case it’s completely fine, as Raskin’s “corrections” don’t really amount to much, and certainly would have led to a path where Macintosh was just another abandoned experiment like the Apple III. Perhaps in this alternate universe, a substantially reworked “Lisa II” might have been Apple’s long-lived computing platform.
- II2II 4mo ago
  The corrections may not amount to much, but there is no reason to believe that his version would be a failed experiment like the Apple III or the Lisa would have taken it's place. Part of the magic of the Macintosh was the simplicity of the hardware. In that respect, it was much closer to the Apple II than the Apple III or Lisa. Consumers may not think much about what's inside the case, but it matters when it comes to manufacturing costs and that translates into the cost for consumers. While the original Macintosh was by no means cheap, it was about half the cost of the Apple III and a quarter of the cost of the Lisa. Heck, even the adoption of the Macintosh was slow because of its price. Maybe a less expensive 6809 based Macintosh would have had more success in the market, at least early on. It's also too easy to read too much into the failure of the Canon Cat. The Canon Cat was introduced years later. User expectations were starting to solidify around the GUI at that point. (Then again, success was not guaranteed. Lacking compatibility with the Apple II would have held it back. Especially so after the introduction of the IBM PC since the IBM PC had IBM backing it.) I also think the adoption of the GUI for consumer computers would have been delayed considerably without the Macintosh 128k. Early machines that supported a GUI tended to be expensive. Early versions of Windows were crude. The only real outliers in that respect were the Atari and the Amiga. Would they have supported a GUI without Apple taking that first step? It's hard to tell.
  - 4mo ago

jnaina 4mo ago

Jef's vision for a high volume appliance computer was eventually realized in the Canon Cat which he co-created with Canon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat Vision may spark greatness, but execution is what makes it real. The Hacker News crowd can debate endlessly about who conceived the Macintosh while dumping on Steve Jobs. But Steve Jobs did what ultimately mattered: he shipped.

uxhacker 4mo ago

But the part that should not be forgot is Jef Raskin’s book The Humane Interface. Many of the ideas in the book are only now implementable with the arrival of AI. Also he defined the difference between computers and humans as computers been precise and accurate and humans as vague, but more flexible. We have now had a paradigm shift in that ai is now the flexible interface that sometimes hallucinates.