Jef Raskin, Mac pioneer, dies at 61

[paineinthearse]

By Steven Musil
URL: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1040_22-5591858.html


Jef Raskin, the human-computer interface expert largely credited with beginning the Macintosh project for Apple Computer, died Saturday at age 61. Raskin, the author of The Humane Interface, died of cancer, according to a man who answered the telephone Sunday at Raskin's Pacifica, Calif., home. Raskin, who named the Macintosh after his favorite fruit, joined Apple in January 1978 as employee No. 31. The Macintosh was launched in 1984, but Raskin left Apple in 1982 amid a well-documented dispute with Steve Jobs.

Reskin was an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, and a visiting scholar at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1970s when he first visited Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). (Apple is often accused of copying Xerox's graphical user interface--GUI--into the Macintosh operating system). "When PARC was in its first few years I was often a visiting academic there, taking part in discussions and viewing with delight some of the developments going on there; I trust that people there also took pleasure in finding in me someone who was already on much the same user-interface wavelength," Raskin later wrote. "I didn't have to be sold on the idea that UI and graphics were of primary importance to the future of computing."

Raskin said he told Jobs and Steve Wozniak about what he had seen at Xerox the first time he met them in their garage in 1976, and that he stopped visiting Xerox when he went to work for Apple "to avoid any possible conflicts of interest." Raskin reportedly left Apple after Jobs increasingly muscled in on the Macintosh project. After leaving Apple, Raskin designed Canon Cat, a small computer with a text-based user interface that did not make use of either a mouse, icons or graphics. Some blamed poor marketing on the part of Canon USA for the computer's short life.

In later years, Raskin worked on The Humane Environment, a system incorporating his interface concepts with open-source elements within a Zooming User Interface. Raskin earned bachelor's degrees in mathematics and philosophy from the State University of New York and a master's degree in computer science from the Pennsylvania State University.

[pnorman]

1. Thanks for that notice.

I had heard of Raskin, but not the details of his break with Apple. And that was the first time I had ever heard of Canon Cat. Here are a few sites I dug out:

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=642
and
http://www.landsnail.com/apple/local/cat/canon.html

There are many more, and I may waste a good part of this evening on them (Sigh ... I just recently finished that Calvin & Hobbes collection that another DUer had kindly provided).

pnorman

[paineinthearse]

2. Google today has a nice touch.

At the bottom of its home page:

In memoriam, Jef Raskin 1943-2005

With a link to all things Raskin.