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Comment by alx__ | Hacker News Reader

Some background on the poster

https://vintagecomputer.ca/the-history-of-apples-pascal-synt...

The comments on this article are even more interesting. The product manager for Apple Pascal has a copy of the poster signed by Niklaus Wirth.

Taylor Pohlman wrote the following there:

> BTW, a final comment. I sent several posters with John Couch (VP Software at the time), when he went to Europe in 1980 to help launch the Apple ///.

My dad used to work at Apple in The Netherlands in the 80s and one day he brought home this poster. I still have it and it is hanging on the wall in my home office 45 years later.

There is also another link between Apple and the artist:

The Apple bite logo was designed by Rob Janoff at Regis McKenna's firm. McKenna says the out-of-order rainbow was inspired by the work of Bay Area commercial illustrator Tom Kamifuji.

I hadn't heard this connection to Tom Kamifuji before, but knew of it being Regis McKenna's work. Here's an example of that exact rainbow I found after a quick search: https://www.flickr.com/photos/30559980@N07/37428150582

>He got two of them autographed by Nicholas Wirth himself

The first comment on that article is pure historical gold - it would be great to get Niklaus Wirth's signature added to this too, if Taylor Pohlman could be convinced to supply a scan?

> Since Jobs did not understand Raskin’s color scheme, he had an artist alter the work, unfortunately, for the worst. Left side, rigid coloring. Right side, chaos.

Interesting to see another datapoint on how an awful asshole of a boss Jobs was.

From this new vector format it should be simpler now to restore the original colors envisioned by Jef Raskin

If we're looking for evidence of what an irascible asshole Jobs was, I'd rather quite the next paragraph:

"Jobs then ordered Raskin’s name removed as the creator of the work and placed the artist’s name in its place."

Wow.

Without reading the comments on the article, there are multiple possible reasons for removing Raskin’s name. The article comments make clear that Raskin didn’t want his name removed. The other possibility was that he did want that, for example because the artist made it less functional. And then he might have asked Jobs to remove his name, and Jobs complied.

A person has the right to take their name off a work if that person doesn’t like how the collaboration affects the work.

The article makes it clear that Raskin wanted to be credited.

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