Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)
lowendmac.com
lowendmac.com
“There's no doubt that Jef was the creator of the Macintosh project at Apple, and that his articulate vision of an exceptionally easy to use, low cost, high volume appliance computer got the ball rolling, and remained near the heart of the project long after Jef left the company. He also deserves ample credit for putting together the extraordinary initial team that created the computer, recruiting former student Bill Atkinson to Apple and then hiring amazing individuals like Burrell Smith, Bud Tribble, Joanna Hoffman and Brian Howard for the Macintosh team. But there is also no escaping the fact that the Macintosh that we know and love is very different than the computer that Jef wanted to build, so much so that he is much more like an eccentric great uncle than the Macintosh's father.
Jef did not want to incorporate what became the two most definitive aspects of Macintosh technology - the Motorola 68000 microprocessor and the mouse pointing device. Jef preferred the 6809, a cheaper but weaker processor which only had 16 bits of address space and would have been obsolete in just a year or two, since it couldn't address more than 64Kbytes. He was dead set against the mouse as well, preferring dedicated meta-keys to do the pointing. He became increasingly alienated from the team, eventually leaving entirely in the summer of 1981, when we were still just getting started, and the final product utilitized very few of the ideas in the Book of Macintosh. In fact, if the name of the project had changed after Steve took over in January 1981, and it almost did (see Bicycle), there wouldn't be much reason to correlate it with his ideas at all.”
This interview does seem to have a comment about it:
> 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.
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.
Perhaps in this alternate universe, a substantially reworked “Lisa II” might have been Apple’s long-lived computing platform.
Part of the magic of the Macintosh was the simplicity of the hardware. In that respect, it was much closer to the Apple II than the Apple III or Lisa. Consumers may not think much about what's inside the case, but it matters when it comes to manufacturing costs and that translates into the cost for consumers. While the original Macintosh was by no means cheap, it was about half the cost of the Apple III and a quarter of the cost of the Lisa. Heck, even the adoption of the Macintosh was slow because of its price. Maybe a less expensive 6809 based Macintosh would have had more success in the market, at least early on. It's also too easy to read too much into the failure of the Canon Cat. The Canon Cat was introduced years later. User expectations were starting to solidify around the GUI at that point. (Then again, success was not guaranteed. Lacking compatibility with the Apple II would have held it back. Especially so after the introduction of the IBM PC since the IBM PC had IBM backing it.)
I also think the adoption of the GUI for consumer computers would have been delayed considerably without the Macintosh 128k. Early machines that supported a GUI tended to be expensive. Early versions of Windows were crude. The only real outliers in that respect were the Atari and the Amiga. Would they have supported a GUI without Apple taking that first step? It's hard to tell.
That was absolutely revolutionary.
S-100 systems and the early PCs were primarily text systems that sometimes happened to do crude graphics.
The original Apple II tried to do graphics but the tech to do it properly just didn't exist. And the underlying UI was still text based.
Raskin's Mac vision didn't make that leap. It wasn't just about the mouse, it was about the philosophy of the product. Raskin wanted text-but-cheaper-and-better, Jobs wanted pictures and art.
What do you reckon the "G" in GUI stands for, out of curiosity?
Made me look it up! I was developing Apple ][/III/Lisa/Mac software at the time. I used the Apple III to write Apple Pascal for the Apple ][, and the Lisa to develop for the Mac. I'd completely forgotten the initial pricing of the Apple III, which was stratospheric. The $7,800 config was 256K I think (~$31K in today's dollars).
"It sold initially for between $4,340 and $7,800, depending on the configuration. The original Apple III had many problems, and was replaced by a revised model in mid 1981, which featured 256K RAM, updated system software, and a lower price ($3495). A 5 MB external hard disk was also made available. The Apple /// sold very poorly and was replaced by the Apple ///+ ($2995) in Late 1983. The Apple ///+ was discontinued in 1985."
Aside from that, the MMU in the Lisa would have been a custom solution which Apple would have to support. When Motorola introduced an MMU, it was for 68020 generation machines. Apple should have been able to introduce memory protection at that point, but didn't. One of the reasons was that Apple struggled to make that next generation operating system while retaining compatibility with existing software (albeit, memory protection may have been only one of many problems). This was by no means a problem exclusive to Apple. Other platforms ran into similar issues.
Since then however Apple's OS and hardware strategy has been much more coherent, with macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS etc. sharing code, and sharing SoC technology as well. Ironically this is similar to Microsoft's "Windows [NT] everywhere" strategy.
I think it was in one of the On the Metal interviews where one of the guests mentions MPW was a submarine project, from UNIX background engineers, to eventually replace Pascal with C++.
https://www.folklore.org/Puzzle.html
To this day, one of my favourite word processors is WriteNow, which was ~100,000 lines of assembly.
Naturally there had to be a balance, until mid-90s what we consider AAA games, were mostly Assembly.
The observation was that linking in the Pascal library was problematic when one was storing everything on a single 400KB Micro Floppy.
Sorry if misunderstood.
But it's unfortunate that losing Pascal/Object Pascal also meant losing bounded strings and array bounds checking, even if people turned the latter off in the 1980s because they thought that the performance cost wasn't worth the reliability improvement. That was probably the wrong trade-off then (at least for most regular application code) and even more so today (especially for the vast amount of legacy C code.)
Until governments and companies decided fixing CVEs was getting too expensive.
Then programming with straightjacket languages suddenly is the new future.
Until AI came to be, now it is a mess again.
I wish Ada had more high-quality open source compilers and libraries, since it seems easier to write than Rust.
According to Wikipedia, the first commercial C++ implementation came out in October of 1985, MPW was released in September of 1986, and MPW C was released in July of 1987.
C++ seems to have been added sometime in ~1988 (??)
Think C 4.0 (later Symantec C/C++) with (C++ like) object extensions seems to have been released for the Mac in 1989.
And the later collaboration with Metrowerks and the PowerPlant framework.
I mentioned the podcast, because Wikipedia is not the source of universal truth.
I looked at the intro to some of the MPW C++ documentation (before posting above, thank you internet) and I think it said that MacApp could be used via the C++ to Object Pascal bridge and that a native C++ framework would be forthcoming.
This seems really extreme. You're saying a trackpad would have made the whole thing a failure?
The Macintosh (specifically the original 128k version) was a dismal market failure too. What succeeded (relatively speaking) was the platform/ecosystem.
The 1986 Macintosh Plus was a huge market success and it is only modestly different from the original. Even the SE and Classic didn't change things much.
Let's be clear, Raskintosh isn't the Macintosh that history eventually proved successful. What Raskin wanted was a significantly simpler and cheaper machine, more squarely pitted against offerings from Amstrad, Atari, and Commodore. Not to mention Apple's own array of ecosystem failures, such as Apple III, Lisa, IIGS, or indeed Newton.
Based on the raw odds, plus hindsight, I contend it would have been an ecosystem failure even if it saw some sales success. By not reaching for the stars, it would have been yet another in a long line of quirky mid-eighties, commercially successful, but short-lived platforms.
Vision may spark greatness, but execution is what makes it real. The Hacker News crowd can debate endlessly about who conceived the Macintosh while dumping on Steve Jobs.
But Steve Jobs did what ultimately mattered: he shipped.
Also he defined the difference between computers and humans as computers been precise and accurate and humans as vague, but more flexible. We have now had a paradigm shift in that ai is now the flexible interface that sometimes hallucinates.
> The Canon Cat used a text-based user interface, without any pointer, mouse, icons, or graphics. All data was seen as a long "stream" of text broken into several pages. Instead of using a traditional command-line interface or menu system, the Cat used its special keyboard, with commands activated by holding down a "Use Front" key and pressing another key.
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat
It was nothing like the Macintosh Apple shipped.
Jasper:
https://lab.alexanderobenauer.com/jasper/
https://lab.alexanderobenauer.com/updates/the-jasper-report
bitters:
https://m15o.ichi.city/bitters/
https://nightfall.city/nex/in/m15o/projects/bitters/ (very similar to the link above, but Nex is a neat protocol...)
Furthermore, Internet Archive hosts a runnable Canon Cat Emulation. I believe this means it is available in MAME as well.
When Raskin was active, there was a whole industry selling "word processors", special purpose computers that just did text processing. Wang and IBM were the biggest makers. The IBM PC was descended from the IBM Displaywriter and used the same monitor. So at the time, word processing looked like the core desktop computer function.
So Raskin perfected the word processor interface. What he didn't get was that computing was not going to stop at word processors.
Everything I've read suggested that Raskin intended it to be programmable from the beginning, using Forth. Other descriptions suggested that, while document oriented, it was not intended to be exclusively oriented towards word processing. At least not in the sense of the (dedicated) word processors of the day. That said, I'm not surprised that user interaction was keyboard based. The project had it's origins around 1978/79. It would be about 5 years until computers were sufficiently powerful to support a coherent GUI at a reasonable price.
The Forth language was available for programming and extending the machine, via a cheatcode. You had to type in the phrase "enable the Forth language" and evaluate it with a special command or something—you know, one of those things to provide hackability for those who needed such while keeping it an office appliance for the vast majority of users. I don't know if there was an intent for a market or library of third-party software, but that doesn't seem to have arisen.
Huh? We seem to have a completely different read of his work, like the whole ZUI Zoomable Interfaces research? That is not about word processing at all. How to navigate and interact with multi-dimensional data.
He says that his Mackintosh was also intended to have a graphic display, not a text display, but with a trackball instead of a mouse, therefore it was completely unlike Canon Cat.
At the end of the article it reads:
> This article was first published on 2005.01.19.
It’s also evidenced by the reference to the “new iMac G5.”
https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html
A short must-read for people designing (via prompt or any other tool) user experiences. It is timeless (so far!)
We had folks such as Jef Raskin, Ted Nelson, Douglas Englebart, James Burke. All quite fascinating & inspiring people.
Jef brought a Cannon Cat and discussed his views on User Interfaces & more. The MPE OS engineering guys were rather sarcastic in hearing his methodology around the OS approach of the CAT.
Behind the Macintosh project, yes.
Behind the Mac, as in, behind the Mac as it actually shipped, no. His ideas had little to do with it - it was almost entirely stuff designed by others when he was out of the project.
It’s been over a decade since the interview. Anyone familiar with anything Raskin was working then that is ubiquitous now?
I have tried editing using only incremental search, and it was awful right up until the moment when I reached for it first instead of wanting a mouse or arrow key and then remembering I was only supposed to use incremental search.
From that moment on, I sailed along just fine. Does that mean it might have "won?" Certainly not, but all the same... Success in software design is absolutely not any kind of meritocracy outside of the tautological "If it won, it must have merit, winning is the metric for merit."
That would have made little difference for a Mackintosh user. The hardware of a trackball is exactly equivalent with that of a mouse, neither is simpler than the other. (Optical mice without rolling balls have appeared only decades later.)
I have actually used trackballs instead of mice for a few years, and I have greatly preferred them to mice or touchpads.
Trackballs tend to be slower than mice, because you normally move them with the thumb or with the fingers, instead of moving the entire hand, but they are usually more comfortable than mice.
Nowadays, since several years ago, I use as the graphic pointing devices small graphic tablets configured in the relative mode instead of their default absolute mode. These are greatly superior from all points of view, speed, accuracy, comfort, to both mice and trackballs and to any other kinds of pointing devices, like trackpoints or touchpads.
So Jef Raskin had good reasons to question which is the best graphic pointing device, instead of just accepting the mouse because that happened to be the choice made at Xerox.
Based on my experience on how much better a stylus is than any kind of mouse, I consider the use of mice for pointing devices as a great historical mistake in the use of computers. I deeply regret that I have used mice for decades, instead of trying to find something better since the beginning.
The Apple Mackintosh is a significant culprit for the undeserved popularity of mice.
I use Wacom Intuos S graphic tablets, on Linux. These are cheap tablets without screens, with a USB or Bluetooth interface.
These tablets have the same size as a traditional mouse pad, so they do not take more size on the desk than a mouse.
The stylus is extremely light, so I can keep it between my fingers while touch typing with all fingers on the keyboard. Thus I can transition between typing and pointing much faster than with a mouse, where I have to grip the mouse or release it.
I configure the tablet in "Relative" mode, where the operating system sees it as a mouse and there is no difference in behavior between it and a mouse.
I configure the stylus to emit a "left click" when I touch the tablet with its tip. The stylus has 2 buttons that can be pressed with your index. I configure one to be "right click" and the other to be "double left click". You can choose any other behaviors.
Holding the stylus is much, much more comfortable than holding a mouse, because of the natural position of the hand.
Moving the cursor with the stylus is much faster than with a mouse. I can move it across the screen from corner to corner instantaneously, because the stylus is much lighter than a mouse, and there is no friction, since it does not touch the tablet, unless you use it to select an area.
The positioning accuracy is much better than with a mouse. If you desire so, you can do handwriting, e.g. signatures, or make drawings with it, which of course is not surprising as this is supposed to be a graphic tablet.
I tried this initially only hoping for a better comfort, because my hand was hurting from the excessive use of mouse all day long. But then I discovered that not only it is very comfortable, but also much faster and more accurate than a mouse can be. Therefore I do not intend to ever use a mouse again.
Trackpads are more comfortable than mice, but they are much slower, so they are not competitive for things like drawing electronics schematics, which I do from time to time. While trackpads, like touchscreens, do not have the inertia problem of a mouse, it is absolutely impossible to move your fingertips with the speed with which you can move the tip of a stylus, which amplifies the amplitude of your finger movements.
There are too few programs which know to use "mouse gestures" for the user interface, e.g. some expensive CAD/EDA programs or the Web browser Vivaldi.
Mouse gestures are already better than any trackpad gestures, but when you use a stylus they become even better, as they are pretty much the same movements as in handwriting.
I found them quite nice in the early days when the popularity of styluses resulted in more experimentation.
I think that radial menus could have been useful when used with graphic tablets used in their default "Absolute" mode, where the position of the stylus on the tablet corresponds directly to the position of the cursor on the screen, which makes more awkward the cursor movements in locations that are far away from the center of the screen.
No such problems exist when the tablet is in "Relative" mode, when the stylus behaves like a mouse, except that it has neither inertia nor friction and your hand rests in its natural orientation.
Using a graphic tablet in "Absolute" mode is equivalent with using a stylus on a touchscreen, e.g. on a smartphone or tablet, so in those cases using radial menus might also be convenient, unlike in my case, where the shape and position of menus do not matter.
The last time when I had an Apple computer was 2 decades ago.
That's what I was referring to
He was a fun person to chat with, lots of great ideas and the drive to work out the details.
Left the strong impression that Jeff thought him an idiot and his questions leave the reader feeling Jeff might be right.
> JW: The original Mac was to be sold for $600. When it finally arrived it cost $2,500 and today the cheapest Mac is $699. Is this a disappointment to you?
> JR: Which? the $2,500, the $699? It was never supposed to be $600.
Like.. terrible question, annoyed interview subject.
He may be the man who started the Macintosh project, but Steve Jobs saved the Mac from him.
The only technical detail that we know about the original Mackintosh that was a mistake was the choice of the MC6809 CPU, for reduced costs.
MC6809 was a very nice CPU and for many programs the Intel 8088 CPU from the IBM PC was slower than a 2 MHz MC6809, but MC6809 was limited to 64 kB of memory, so the original Mackintosh would have become obsolete very quickly.
This is not enough to allow anyone to claim that it would have been a commercial disaster, but it would certainly would have had a short lifetime and then there would have been significant costs to port any software to a replacement CPU with a greater address space.