The Mac Inventor's Gift Before Dying: An Immortal Design Lesson For His Son

A nice blog entry on the emotional level, a fond remembrance of a father who's passed away.

And yet... even as someone who knew (slightly) and liked (muchly) Jef Raskin, I find myself grinding my teeth every time Aza refers to his father as "the man who invented the Macintosh." Because, well, no, he didn't. What Raskin thought the Macintosh should be was a low-cost, non-bitmapped computer designed along the lines of his later computer, the Canon Cat. And as nifty as that computer with Forth in ROM might have been, it's not an accident that it sank like a stone in the market. In contrast, what Jobs thought the Mac should be is what we got, and frankly I think the world is much richer for Jobs' vision prevailing over Raskin's.

One of the key points about Jef Raskin was that he was creative and inventive, but could become fixated on ideas to the point of not noticing how the market had responded. An example that springs to mind was his adding special "leap" keys to the Canon Cat's keyboard and patenting the layout. Because he just knew his interface design was superior and therefore customers should (would!) adapt themselves to his way of doing things.

Perhaps more telling is the example his son chooses to close his post, where he describes the gift of a vintage safety razor: "It's the kind of clear insight for which all designers and inventors strive: beauty in turning constraints into advantages." A more detached assessment might have been, "a beautiful design from a time that is thankfully well behind us."