Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac - Low End MacLow End Mac

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Jef Raskin founded the Macintosh project at Apple, which led to the development of the Apple Mac and the popularisation of the graphical user-interface. He was Apple employee #31 and left the Macintosh team in mid-1981 after Steve Jobs took over the project.

Jason Walsh: Before the Mac you were a professor of music. As a musician you presumably appreciate complex but specific tools for use by virtuosos. Your major contribution to computing, the Macintosh, seems to point in the other direction – simplicity of use. How do you square these facts?

Jef Raskin: I was never a professor of music. I was, however, a music graduate student and later a professional musician. I’d love to simplify musical instruments; we can do better than the present awkward keyboard arrangement on pianos, for example. And I did design software that allowed me to compose and edit printed music much more easily than doing it by hand. However, like the QWERTY keyboard, some things are so embedded in our culture that it is futile to try to change them. 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.

I do not see any conflict to square.

JW: You originally managed Apple’s publication unit. How did you convince the company to allow you to pursue the Macintosh project?

JR: I convinced the chairman of the board at the time, Mike Markkula, of the correctness of my vision. I avoided the supposed "visionaries" in the company who could not understand my idea but presented a business case: People would buy a product that they could readily and happily use. I wrote forward-looking white papers such as "Computers by the Millions" so that management could see what the computing world would be like in the coming decade. People who want to know exactly what I was saying in 1979 can read it and other writings of mine at www.jefraskin.com or see the particular document at http://sourceforge.net/projects/humane/

It ends with a question: What will millions of people do with them?

I answered that with another essay from the same year that is the appendix to "Holes in the Histories" on www.jefraskin.com or surf directly to http://sourceforge.net/projects/humane/.

JW: Perhaps the longest surviving legacy of your original Mac design is the "appliance" nature of the all-in-one Macs. Do you think this simplicity of design has been key to making the Mac as popular as it is?

JR: Yes, but unfortunately, the Mac is now a massive mess. A third party manual (Pogue’s ‘The Missing Manual’) is nearly a thousand pages and is far from complete. Apple now does development by accretion, and there is very little difference (but there’s still some difference) between using a Mac and a Windows machine.

JW: Many individuals – notably Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive, Jerry Manock, and Harmut Esslinger – have become noteworthy through Apple’s industrial design. Considering that the key to Apple’s success in this area is largely due to your insistence on the Mac having an all-in-one appliance-like form factor, do you feel that your contribution in this area has been ignored?

JR: [This is] not an important issue.

JW: Several people have suggested that whilst you are indisputably the father of the Mac, it would have been a significantly different machine had it followed your original plans. Some have argued, for instance, that it would have had a text interface. Is this the case?

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.

JW: How do you rate today’s Mac UI, both in the context of its competitors and against your original vision for computers with the Mac?

JR: I think I have answered most of this already. My original vision is outdated and irrelevant today. The principles of putting people first and designing from the interface to the software and hardware are as vital today as they were then.

JW: What do you make of the new iMac G5? Was the original iMac a step back onto the correct path for the Mac?

JR: iMac G5? The unfoldable...