Macintosh Creator Raskin Dies at 61

[democracyindanger]

Jef Raskin, a computer interface expert who conceived Apple Computer Inc.'s groundbreaking Macintosh computer but left the company before it came to market, has died. He was 61.


Raskin died Saturday night at his home in Pacifica, Calif., his family said in a statement. In December, he told friends he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.


Raskin joined Apple in 1978 — as its 31st employee — to start the young company's publications department. At the time, computers were primarily text-based and users had to remember a series of arcane commands to perform the simplest tasks.


http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/02/27/financial/f181938S03.DTL

[benburch]

1. You'll be missed, Jef.

But your work will live on as long as there are personal computers.

[wtmusic]

2. In 1978 'users had to remember a series of arcane commands'

what they don't mention is that users often accomplished (some still do) their tasks faster than with a GUI

[TahitiNut]

3. Ubetcha. There's power in a CLI.

:thumbsup:

[burrowowl]

12. Not for the work

normal people have to do.

As one who has worked on IBM Virtual Machines, VAX, the early PCs (DOS), etc. the MAC was a godsend, real WYSIWYG was a real godsend along with real wrap-around (on DOS machines corrections, since only 80 charaters were displayed until wrap, you corrected somehting and the PC pool created errors that weren't there to begin with, etc.). And still M$ is not really WSISWYG. And AutoCad is a real throw-back, half-ass command-half-ass GUI.
May he RIP.

[TahitiNut]

17. The loss of scripting has never been made up, imho.

.BAT was never a decent scripting facility for the DOS CLI.

I'm one of those fortunate few who had the opportunity to work on an Alto Workstation at Xerox back in the days ... and on their internal research internet. Thus, I was exposed not only to GUI R&D but CLI R&D ... as well as the (Dave) Boggs & (Bob) Metcalf prototype 'novelty' called Ethernet. The industry has still not caught up to some of what I got to play with in those days.

[customerserviceguy]

26. Yes, there is

But if it hadn't have been for Graphical User Interfaces, some 90% of the people using computers would not have started. I know I wouldn't have back in 1996.

Having GUI's means more work for folks who do understand the internal power of computers, and more productivity for those who use personal machines.

[daleo]

5. That is true.

Sometimes graphics interfaces can be annoying, and I find the "mousing" can be difficult on the hand - more so than typing.

Too bad about the designer, though. You don't last long with pancreatic cancer, unfortunately.

[Merlot]

7. Mouse are for cats

Get a tablet and pen. Cheap (probably under $100) and a small price to pay to avoid all the ailments of mousing.

And a pen is SO much faster!

[alfredo]

10. Wacom is the best in my opinion.

I also use a Kensington Expert Mouse, the one with the big trackball.


Raskin helped change our whole culture. RIP


((( I like Penfold's Rawson's Retreat Merlot.)))

[daleo]

11. It hasn't bothered me much for the last year or two.

But I did have a bad spell for a year or so. I will keep the advice about tablet and pen in mind.

[TahitiNut]

16. A CAT is often better than a mouse.

That's why they're putting 'em on notebooks. They were used on the Xerox 850's with excellent success.


(CAT = Capacitance Activated Transducer)

[benburch]

6. Yes, but my Mother would never have learned to use a CLI.

And she really liked the Mac we got her a couple of years before she passed away.

[bpilgrim]

8. but that wasn't revolutionary - the GUI was

and the mac now has BOTH :bounce:

simply the best PC on the planet.

peace

[area51]

15. "... users often accomplished ... their tasks faster than with a GUI"

True.

Unix rules / Windows drools. :evilgrin:

[Lithos]

18. Yep

For those who don't remember, read "In the Beginning, There was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson.

L-

[AuntiBush]

4. Raskin & Mac's - the Best. Sorry to hear this.

Love Macs! Remembering the very first one I ever had. Take care Raskin. You left us too soon.

[burrowowl]

9. RIP

Raskin!

[slaveplanet]

13. One of the colassal

blunders in the anals of modern business.

The pirate Raskin never had to unsheath his sword to get the keys to the treasure chest from the heroic Parc researchers.

Xerox could have seriously put the kabosh on Microsoft.

And we'd have a different kind of world.....

[President Jesus]

19. not so sure a Xerox-dominated world would be any better (nt)

[slaveplanet]

20. didn't say better

just different....



http://www.digibarn.com/stories/desktop-history/bushytree.html

[dhinojosa]

21. LMAO!!! Correction: annals NOT anals (n/t)

[Spider Jerusalem]

14. Except he DIDN'T "conceive" the Mac.

The idea came from a visit to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre, where Xerox had a machine running a GUI with a mouse for input in addition to the keyboard. Bit of a misattribution there.

[Nostradamus]

22. The Amiga, out at the same time, was years ahead of the Mac

It is difficult to indicate just how advanced the Amiga was compared to other systems. Apple had a graphical interface but was largely restricted to the black and white monitor display, whilst PCs were still horrible text based systems. The Amiga also had an ace up its sleeve by the fact that it was TV compatible and could be used for editing footage. A task that even now the Mac and PC cannot do as standard. The Juggler demo, consisting of a character juggling reflective balls in a 3D environment, attracted customers to the graphical capabilities. This spurred Electronic Arts to rewrite their IBM PC package, Prism (which was an enhanced port of Doodle for Xerox machines) and release it for the Amiga during September. The rewrite was christened Deluxe Paint and the rest is history.

http://amiga.emugaming.com/ahistory.html

The first commercially produced Amiga was the AMIGA A1000 with a lengthy 68 Pin dual in line 68000 processor running at 7 MHz (NTSC) clock speed, 256 KB RAM, packaged in a very neat, very tidy aesthetically pleasing, compact desktop case, offering the unique feature of a place to house the keyboard neatly, under the front of the A1000. As an "OPTIONAL EXTRA", a 256 K add in ram module was offered to upgrade the machine to a full half a megabyte... wow! , a half meg multitasking computer ..awesome in 1985 ! later on, a PAL conversion "MODIFICATION" was fitted to all Australian NTSC to convert the NTSC CVBS to PAL CVBS, because of its high technical nature,this was done by a AMIGA technician
Most 1985-86 software that was correctly written in that era by programmers who followed the Commodore-Amiga guidelines, still works today on the newest,and fastest machines, but its day, it was indeed a milestone, no other computer came near it, other platforms looked on on awe, at its beauty, its neat size and more noticeably, its screen colours, all 4096 out of a palette of 16.7 million . It stood alone!. Unchallenged , No-one had a all-purpose, pre-emptive multi-tasking computer that actually spoke to you in computerised voice ( a bit like the character "Darth Vader" from StarWars®) and played sounds and recorded sound files (IFF's) and ran a thing called a "SIDECAR" to run MS-DOS of the day , we at Unitech Electronics Still keep one, it still runs flawlessly today 18 years later !

http://www.unitechelectronics.com/hist.htm

[Book Lover]

24. I still have my 4000

active to run a few old Cinemaware games... A true shame the Amiga never got the fiscal and marketing support it needed to win the desktop wars.

[Book Lover]

23. Jef had a column in our local (Pacifica) paper

in which he would never fail to mention that he "invented" the Mac, which was always annoying. OTOH, he always had something thoughtful to say about our local politics, as well as the big political picture. A complex man, apparently.

[Deja Q]

25. they think the mac is groundbreaking!??!

The guy who saw Xerox's invention and gave it to a company.

The Mac is not groundbreaking. Apple introduced the Lisa a year ealier. It had a GUI, fully pre-emptive multitasking, and more. The cost? $10,000. Nobody would pay that much unless it was a supercomputer. It was not a supercomputer but a spiffy microcomputer.

And if they mean 'groundbreaking' for the GUI and Mouse, Xerox got there LONG before Apple did.

People die all the time, my condolances to his family. But the product itself is not spectacular.