"The design was originally envisioned in the late 1970s by early Apple employee Jef Raskin as a truly accessible computer that didn't require the at times arcane text commands of most computers."
That first paragraph is completely wrong.
Raskin has overstated his case, and people who want to knock Jobs have seized upon that. Did this writer ever see this "design" supposedly by Raskin? Done in the "late 1970s"? What ~ before Raskin had even seen SmallTalk?
This design (the one in the top picture) had little to do with Jef Raskin.
He WROTE a plan for a $500 computer without really knowing how to engineer such a machine. Raskin's proposal had NO MOUSE ~ hardly the Mac then, is it?
What it did take was THE NAME of Jef Raskin's favorite apple.
Para 2: "Based heavily on ideas from Xerox's PARC research facility..."
On the contrary, after Jef Raskin was shown (with others) the amazing paradigm at PARC (which included SmallTalk), he is reported to have said to Larry Tesler, "We don't need this, but I'm glad they saw it."
If Jobs had listened to Apple, that paradigm ~ unappreciated by Xerox ~ would have remained in a lab, or maybe been bought by someone else.
APPLE BOUGHT IT, admittedly not for much ~ partly because the "wizards" at Palo Alto so badly wanted to see their vision become reality ~ and partly because Apple thought (and they were right) that it would take time and several millions to turn this into a viable product.
(Those involved have their names inside the original casing. And they don't recall things the same way as Jef Raskin)
The deal was (I believe) made in December 1979 and it would take until January 1984 to become commercial reality as the Macintosh. And it nearly failed.
It would seem that Aidan Malley (and many more on these forums) really do need to read Steven Levy's book 'Insanely Great'.
And to correct another (tiresome) urban myth restated elsewhere: Apple DID NOT STEAL 'The Mouse' from Xerox. The people at Xerox PARC had incorporated into their scheme this neglected invention from the 1960s made by Douglas Engelbart.
Wikipedia him to see the vast improvement Apple made upon it, using a license paid to SRI, who held the patent. Sadly, typically, Engelbart himself got no royalties.
The "one button" thing came out of those four years of development when Apple research found that secretaries worked best that way ~ though they had tried two- and three-button devices. (The picture on the Wikipedia page doesn't show it, but Engelbart's original had 3 buttons)
"The design was originally envisioned in the late 1970s by early Apple employee Jef Raskin as a truly accessible computer that didn't require the at times arcane text commands of most computers."
That first paragraph is completely wrong.
Raskin has overstated his case, and people who want to knock Jobs have seized upon that. Did this writer ever see this "design" supposedly by Raskin? Done in the "late 1970s"? What ~ before Raskin had even seen SmallTalk?
This design (the one in the top picture) had little to do with Jef Raskin.
He WROTE a plan for a $500 computer without really knowing how to engineer such a machine. Raskin's proposal had NO MOUSE ~ hardly the Mac then, is it?
What it did take was THE NAME of Jef Raskin's favorite apple.
Para 2: "Based heavily on ideas from Xerox's PARC research facility..."
On the contrary, after Jef Raskin was shown (with others) the amazing paradigm at PARC (which included SmallTalk), he is reported to have said to Larry Tesler, "We don't need this, but I'm glad they saw it."
IF JOBS HAD LISTENED TO RASKIN, that paradigm ~ unappreciated by Xerox ~ would have remained in a lab, or maybe been bought by someone else.
APPLE BOUGHT IT, admittedly not for much ~ partly because the "wizards" at Palo Alto so badly wanted to see their vision become reality ~ and partly because Apple thought (and they were right) that it would take time and several millions to turn this into a viable product.
(Those involved have their names inside the original casing. And they don't recall things the same way as Jef Raskin)
The deal was (I believe) made in December 1979 and it would take until January 1984 to become commercial reality as the Macintosh. And it nearly failed.
It would seem that Aidan Malley (and many more on these forums) really do need to read Steven Levy's book 'Insanely Great'.
And to correct another (tiresome) urban myth restated elsewhere: Apple DID NOT STEAL 'The Mouse' from Xerox. The people at Xerox PARC had incorporated into their scheme this neglected invention from the 1960s made by Douglas Engelbart.
Wikipedia him to see the vast improvement Apple made upon it, using a license paid to SRI, who held the patent. Sadly, typically, Engelbart himself got no royalties.
The "one button" thing came out of those four years of development when Apple research found that secretaries worked best that way ~ though they had tried two- and three-button devices. (The picture on the Wikipedia page doesn't show it, but Engelbart's original had 3 buttons)
Next week - the Iconic 1984 Apple superbowl commercial announcing the mac - still the best ever - has 25th anniversary as well. Next Sunday would be an interesting time to launch a 25th anniversary edition imac with something more than a mac/PC clone commercial. This is just an observation of an opportunity, not a prediction.
As an architect, harnessing the power of computers to help create the drawings of a building has been a dream since my student days. 30 years ago you needed technicians to input simple data, and 2 days later you would get a shaky wireframe 3D rendering.
For me, AutoCad on the PC was the first chance to use a computer for design. I learned all the DOS commands (33 of them?) I needed to make it work, and learned to write down the filenames so I could make the commands work, such as changing the name of a file or deleting it.
Then, an actress friend went on tour and lent me her Mac Plus (actually upgraded from 128k). I remember the frustration I felt when I couldn't find the Mac equivalent of the DOS command to re-name the file, even though I could see it graphically, and my surprise when I eventually clicked the mouse on the file's name and suddenly found I could just click on the name and change it........
That was my Eureka moment: I was looking for something that was difficult and the Mac made it so easy .....................
"The design was originally envisioned in the late 1970s by early Apple employee Jef Raskin as a truly accessible computer that didn't require the at times arcane text commands of most computers."
That first paragraph is completely wrong.
Raskin has overstated his case, and people who want to knock Jobs have seized upon that. Did this writer ever see this "design" supposedly by Raskin? Done in the "late 1970s"? What ~ before Raskin had even seen SmallTalk?
This design (the one in the top picture) had little to do with Jef Raskin.
He WROTE a plan for a $500 computer without really knowing how to engineer such a machine. Raskin's proposal had NO MOUSE ~ hardly the Mac then, is it?
What it did take was THE NAME of Jef Raskin's favorite apple.
Para 2: "Based heavily on ideas from Xerox's PARC research facility..."
On the contrary, after Jef Raskin was shown (with others) the amazing paradigm at PARC (which included SmallTalk), he is reported to have said to Larry Tesler, "We don't need this, but I'm glad they saw it."
IF JOBS HAD LISTENED TO RASKIN, that paradigm ~ unappreciated by Xerox ~ would have remained in a lab, or maybe been bought by someone else.
[...]
It would seem that Aidan Malley (and many more on these forums) really do need to read Steven Levy's book 'Insanely Great'.
[...]
According to Raskin, he frequented PARC prior to joining Apple... he found like minded folks there to discuss UI ideas. He also claims to have been the one that originally wanted Jobs to visit PARC in the hopes that Jobs would finally understand the kinds of things he wanted to do. Raskin's 1967 thesis "A Hardware-Independent Computer Drawing System Using List-Structured Modeling: The Quick-Draw Graphics System" was on bit-mapped graphics and WYSIWYG UIs (apparently Apple got the name "QuickDraw" from Raskin too).
Also according to Raskin he developed the click-drag technique, and argued for a one button mouse in a memo to Larry Tessler (a former Xerox PARC employee at Apple, see: http://mxmora.best.vwh.net/JefRaskin.html).
Although he prefered other input devices (e.g., trackballs and tablets) to mice, I haven't seen anything that indicates Raskin was advocating a keyboard/text only interface for the Mac. See: http://library.stanford.edu/mac/prim...askin/gui.html.
Apparently Markkula originally wanted Raskin to look at developing a $500 game machine, but Raskin wasn't interested. He counter-proposed an easy to use computer for the masses at the same price point, and that was agreed to. Raskin's early notes on the Macintosh (then called Annie) project talk about a computer in "one lump" with a handle which sounds familiar... see: http://library.stanford.edu/mac/prim...hrophilic.html.
While clearly Raskin had little to do with the final implementation, it is also fairly clear that the final product is heavily influenced by his ideas (modeless GUI) and project goals. It is also true Raskin was not completely happy with the way it turned out... he thought it should have been even easier to use.
One thing I didn't realize until reading some of these documents: Job's Lisa did not originally have a GUI...
Good article, but the innovative hardware was only half the story of apple's resurgence. Apple fans will recall the desperate days of the early 90s when it was painfully obvious that MacOS could no longer cut it against Windows NT in areas like crash protection, multi-tasking and so on. Apple started several find-a-new-OS initiatives (Pink, Taligent, ...) none of which did much more than flop around like a fish on the beach.
It wasn't until Jobs returned and settled the OS argument once and for all that developers could safely return to the Mac. Fortunately for us, he chose an OS with industrial-strength underpinnings (UNIX) and (did he know this would happen?) made consequently made the Mac a useful tool for work in fields such as life sciences. Goodbye $20000 SGI workstation, hello PowerBook.
I'm just thankful that Apple continues to march to the beat of its own drum. Just think of what the company would be like if it actually listened to all the armchair engineers, marketing geniuses, and financial wizards that post in forums like AppleInsider. It be like...like...Windows.
It is like?like?Windows.
It now uses Intel chips, can boot to Windows, most files require file extensions, the OS has become a hardware hog and so complex that when things go wrong it can be a right pain in the arse.
It even gave me a Blue Screen of Death last week.
It has increasingly been marketed to the techno-ignorant masses with glossy trinkets and pointless and inconsistent visual changes to the UI. The professional users are repeatedly told they are not the market, after being told they are the market, when they hit the problems thrown up by half baked technology.
The Mac mainstream advantages have been thrown to the dogs whenever Apple feels like it, and we are left with odd premonitions of other axes yet to fall as Mac is removed from the OS name, alt replaces option and FireWire finds itself half out the door.
OSX will become more and more like Windows the more popular it gets, and then there'll be a new underdog that'll be 'cool' to support and the focus will shift again. Swings and roundabouts, that's all.
The Mac mainstream advantages have been thrown to the dogs whenever Apple feels like it, and we are left with odd premonitions of other axes yet to fall as Mac is removed from the OS name, alt replaces option and FireWire finds itself half out the door.
I tested a Lisa when it came out. When the Mac came out, I became a user as my university had the good idea to buy a few.
I've used Macs on and off since then, as well as Windows. In my experience, OS/9 stunk, and OS/X is miles better. Not that OS/9 was really bad, but it was old and unstable in comparison to Windows NT. The GUI was nicer, but that was the end of it. Certainly nothing to look back upon as the good old days.
In fact, before OS/X and between Windows NT and Windows 2000, I was regularly recommending PC's to anybody who would ask me, so long as they didn't run Windows 95/98/Me.
But then OS/X came out, the hardware became compelling again, and Microsoft got stuck in XP, which was little more than a bloated 2000. I don't even need to mention Vista.
So Macs became the clearly better choice around 2002 or so, and are even more so now. Also, Cocoa is a wonderful development environment, much leaner than .Net could ever hope to be.
Sure there are some GUI inconsistencies, but Mac/OS was never perfect. Not all times past were better. Leopard is a fine OS and if they have been making it leaner, Snow Leopard will be even better.
Thanks irobot2004 for looking to get the record straight.
I clicked on the links. My problem is: I'm not sure if I can believe Jef Raskin. He has lodged papers with Stanford that seem 'constructed' to put himself in a favorable light for posterity.
Everyone (certainly in the Macworld, and maybe even in the Parallel Cosmos) has probably heard of Steve Jobs' 'Reality Distortion Field'. And never in a kind way. I've thought about this, and considered 'Who's to say Jef Raskin didn't have a Reality Distortion Field of his own?' I think we are dealing with a massive ego.
You'll notice the source of all this... is Jef Raskin. You will notice he never seems to want, say, Bill Atkinson to get more recognition. I wasn't there. So what can I do? Well, at the risk of being wrong, I have tended to trust people like Steven Levy and 'Robert X. Cringely' because they have seemed more objective to me.
How is it in interviews with the latter, none of the people who were secretly creating all our futures at Xerox PARC tells it the way Raskin does? All these great things he thought of... who's to say he thought of them first? Seeing what became the Macintosh, he says, "oh, it should have been easier"... words to that effect.
SO GO JEF! ~ go and make a better and easier Macintosh! Why didn't you go and DO all the things you claim you thought of or wanted to see done?
Raskin claims it was him "arguing for a one-button mouse" but the science journalist Steven Levy explains that came from research using secretaries. There would be no need for an argument, it seems to me ~ just an acceptance of the data.
Okay, Jef was peeved because Jobs has "forced him out". I get tired hearing (not from you, bud, but elsewhere many times) "oh... Steve Jobs took the credit..." Well, actually, he never did. Steve Jobs never claimed to have 'invented the Macintosh' ~ he was always a front-man for a team of people. (Maybe Jef just can't admit, he was a lousy team player?)
Jobs is one guy. Why didn't Wozniak see the greater merits of Raskin and fight for his pimacy of place? Why didn't the rest of Silicon Valley (all these visionaries) compete to put Jef Raskin's better world into reality?
Someone DESCRIBING a computer, whether in advance with prescience ~ or afterwards with hindsight ~ has not "invented" anything!
Comments
Thanks guys!
That first paragraph is completely wrong.
Raskin has overstated his case, and people who want to knock Jobs have seized upon that. Did this writer ever see this "design" supposedly by Raskin? Done in the "late 1970s"? What ~ before Raskin had even seen SmallTalk?
This design (the one in the top picture) had little to do with Jef Raskin.
He WROTE a plan for a $500 computer without really knowing how to engineer such a machine. Raskin's proposal had NO MOUSE ~ hardly the Mac then, is it?
What it did take was THE NAME of Jef Raskin's favorite apple.
Para 2: "Based heavily on ideas from Xerox's PARC research facility..."
On the contrary, after Jef Raskin was shown (with others) the amazing paradigm at PARC (which included SmallTalk), he is reported to have said to Larry Tesler, "We don't need this, but I'm glad they saw it."
If Jobs had listened to Apple, that paradigm ~ unappreciated by Xerox ~ would have remained in a lab, or maybe been bought by someone else.
APPLE BOUGHT IT, admittedly not for much ~ partly because the "wizards" at Palo Alto so badly wanted to see their vision become reality ~ and partly because Apple thought (and they were right) that it would take time and several millions to turn this into a viable product.
(Those involved have their names inside the original casing. And they don't recall things the same way as Jef Raskin
The deal was (I believe) made in December 1979 and it would take until January 1984 to become commercial reality as the Macintosh. And it nearly failed.
It would seem that Aidan Malley (and many more on these forums) really do need to read Steven Levy's book 'Insanely Great'.
Wikipedia him to see the vast improvement Apple made upon it, using a license paid to SRI, who held the patent. Sadly, typically, Engelbart himself got no royalties.
The "one button" thing came out of those four years of development when Apple research found that secretaries worked best that way ~ though they had tried two- and three-button devices. (The picture on the Wikipedia page doesn't show it, but Engelbart's original had 3 buttons)
That first paragraph is completely wrong.
Raskin has overstated his case, and people who want to knock Jobs have seized upon that. Did this writer ever see this "design" supposedly by Raskin? Done in the "late 1970s"? What ~ before Raskin had even seen SmallTalk?
This design (the one in the top picture) had little to do with Jef Raskin.
He WROTE a plan for a $500 computer without really knowing how to engineer such a machine. Raskin's proposal had NO MOUSE ~ hardly the Mac then, is it?
What it did take was THE NAME of Jef Raskin's favorite apple.
Para 2: "Based heavily on ideas from Xerox's PARC research facility..."
On the contrary, after Jef Raskin was shown (with others) the amazing paradigm at PARC (which included SmallTalk), he is reported to have said to Larry Tesler, "We don't need this, but I'm glad they saw it."
IF JOBS HAD LISTENED TO RASKIN, that paradigm ~ unappreciated by Xerox ~ would have remained in a lab, or maybe been bought by someone else.
APPLE BOUGHT IT, admittedly not for much ~ partly because the "wizards" at Palo Alto so badly wanted to see their vision become reality ~ and partly because Apple thought (and they were right) that it would take time and several millions to turn this into a viable product.
(Those involved have their names inside the original casing. And they don't recall things the same way as Jef Raskin
The deal was (I believe) made in December 1979 and it would take until January 1984 to become commercial reality as the Macintosh. And it nearly failed.
It would seem that Aidan Malley (and many more on these forums) really do need to read Steven Levy's book 'Insanely Great'.
Wikipedia him to see the vast improvement Apple made upon it, using a license paid to SRI, who held the patent. Sadly, typically, Engelbart himself got no royalties.
The "one button" thing came out of those four years of development when Apple research found that secretaries worked best that way ~ though they had tried two- and three-button devices. (The picture on the Wikipedia page doesn't show it, but Engelbart's original had 3 buttons)
For me, AutoCad on the PC was the first chance to use a computer for design. I learned all the DOS commands (33 of them?) I needed to make it work, and learned to write down the filenames so I could make the commands work, such as changing the name of a file or deleting it.
Then, an actress friend went on tour and lent me her Mac Plus (actually upgraded from 128k). I remember the frustration I felt when I couldn't find the Mac equivalent of the DOS command to re-name the file, even though I could see it graphically, and my surprise when I eventually clicked the mouse on the file's name and suddenly found I could just click on the name and change it........
That was my Eureka moment: I was looking for something that was difficult and the Mac made it so easy .....................
"The design was originally envisioned in the late 1970s by early Apple employee Jef Raskin as a truly accessible computer that didn't require the at times arcane text commands of most computers."
That first paragraph is completely wrong.
Raskin has overstated his case, and people who want to knock Jobs have seized upon that. Did this writer ever see this "design" supposedly by Raskin? Done in the "late 1970s"? What ~ before Raskin had even seen SmallTalk?
This design (the one in the top picture) had little to do with Jef Raskin.
He WROTE a plan for a $500 computer without really knowing how to engineer such a machine. Raskin's proposal had NO MOUSE ~ hardly the Mac then, is it?
What it did take was THE NAME of Jef Raskin's favorite apple.
Para 2: "Based heavily on ideas from Xerox's PARC research facility..."
On the contrary, after Jef Raskin was shown (with others) the amazing paradigm at PARC (which included SmallTalk), he is reported to have said to Larry Tesler, "We don't need this, but I'm glad they saw it."
IF JOBS HAD LISTENED TO RASKIN, that paradigm ~ unappreciated by Xerox ~ would have remained in a lab, or maybe been bought by someone else.
[...]
It would seem that Aidan Malley (and many more on these forums) really do need to read Steven Levy's book 'Insanely Great'.
[...]
According to Raskin, he frequented PARC prior to joining Apple... he found like minded folks there to discuss UI ideas. He also claims to have been the one that originally wanted Jobs to visit PARC in the hopes that Jobs would finally understand the kinds of things he wanted to do. Raskin's 1967 thesis "A Hardware-Independent Computer Drawing System Using List-Structured Modeling: The Quick-Draw Graphics System" was on bit-mapped graphics and WYSIWYG UIs (apparently Apple got the name "QuickDraw" from Raskin too).
Also according to Raskin he developed the click-drag technique, and argued for a one button mouse in a memo to Larry Tessler (a former Xerox PARC employee at Apple, see: http://mxmora.best.vwh.net/JefRaskin.html).
Although he prefered other input devices (e.g., trackballs and tablets) to mice, I haven't seen anything that indicates Raskin was advocating a keyboard/text only interface for the Mac. See: http://library.stanford.edu/mac/prim...askin/gui.html.
Apparently Markkula originally wanted Raskin to look at developing a $500 game machine, but Raskin wasn't interested. He counter-proposed an easy to use computer for the masses at the same price point, and that was agreed to. Raskin's early notes on the Macintosh (then called Annie) project talk about a computer in "one lump" with a handle which sounds familiar... see: http://library.stanford.edu/mac/prim...hrophilic.html.
While clearly Raskin had little to do with the final implementation, it is also fairly clear that the final product is heavily influenced by his ideas (modeless GUI) and project goals. It is also true Raskin was not completely happy with the way it turned out... he thought it should have been even easier to use.
One thing I didn't realize until reading some of these documents: Job's Lisa did not originally have a GUI...
It wasn't until Jobs returned and settled the OS argument once and for all that developers could safely return to the Mac. Fortunately for us, he chose an OS with industrial-strength underpinnings (UNIX) and (did he know this would happen?) made consequently made the Mac a useful tool for work in fields such as life sciences. Goodbye $20000 SGI workstation, hello PowerBook.
I'm just thankful that Apple continues to march to the beat of its own drum. Just think of what the company would be like if it actually listened to all the armchair engineers, marketing geniuses, and financial wizards that post in forums like AppleInsider. It be like...like...Windows.
It is like?like?Windows.
It now uses Intel chips, can boot to Windows, most files require file extensions, the OS has become a hardware hog and so complex that when things go wrong it can be a right pain in the arse.
It even gave me a Blue Screen of Death last week.
It has increasingly been marketed to the techno-ignorant masses with glossy trinkets and pointless and inconsistent visual changes to the UI. The professional users are repeatedly told they are not the market, after being told they are the market, when they hit the problems thrown up by half baked technology.
The Mac mainstream advantages have been thrown to the dogs whenever Apple feels like it, and we are left with odd premonitions of other axes yet to fall as Mac is removed from the OS name, alt replaces option and FireWire finds itself half out the door.
The Mac mainstream advantages have been thrown to the dogs whenever Apple feels like it, and we are left with odd premonitions of other axes yet to fall as Mac is removed from the OS name, alt replaces option and FireWire finds itself half out the door.
I tested a Lisa when it came out. When the Mac came out, I became a user as my university had the good idea to buy a few.
I've used Macs on and off since then, as well as Windows. In my experience, OS/9 stunk, and OS/X is miles better. Not that OS/9 was really bad, but it was old and unstable in comparison to Windows NT. The GUI was nicer, but that was the end of it. Certainly nothing to look back upon as the good old days.
In fact, before OS/X and between Windows NT and Windows 2000, I was regularly recommending PC's to anybody who would ask me, so long as they didn't run Windows 95/98/Me.
But then OS/X came out, the hardware became compelling again, and Microsoft got stuck in XP, which was little more than a bloated 2000. I don't even need to mention Vista.
So Macs became the clearly better choice around 2002 or so, and are even more so now. Also, Cocoa is a wonderful development environment, much leaner than .Net could ever hope to be.
Sure there are some GUI inconsistencies, but Mac/OS was never perfect. Not all times past were better. Leopard is a fine OS and if they have been making it leaner, Snow Leopard will be even better.
I clicked on the links. My problem is: I'm not sure if I can believe Jef Raskin. He has lodged papers with Stanford that seem 'constructed' to put himself in a favorable light for posterity.
Everyone (certainly in the Macworld, and maybe even in the Parallel Cosmos) has probably heard of Steve Jobs' 'Reality Distortion Field'. And never in a kind way. I've thought about this, and considered 'Who's to say Jef Raskin didn't have a Reality Distortion Field of his own?' I think we are dealing with a massive ego.
You'll notice the source of all this... is Jef Raskin. You will notice he never seems to want, say, Bill Atkinson to get more recognition. I wasn't there. So what can I do? Well, at the risk of being wrong, I have tended to trust people like Steven Levy and 'Robert X. Cringely' because they have seemed more objective to me.
How is it in interviews with the latter, none of the people who were secretly creating all our futures at Xerox PARC tells it the way Raskin does? All these great things he thought of... who's to say he thought of them first? Seeing what became the Macintosh, he says, "oh, it should have been easier"... words to that effect.
SO GO JEF! ~ go and make a better and easier Macintosh! Why didn't you go and DO all the things you claim you thought of or wanted to see done?
Raskin claims it was him "arguing for a one-button mouse" but the science journalist Steven Levy explains that came from research using secretaries. There would be no need for an argument, it seems to me ~ just an acceptance of the data.
Okay, Jef was peeved because Jobs has "forced him out". I get tired hearing (not from you, bud, but elsewhere many times) "oh... Steve Jobs took the credit..." Well, actually, he never did. Steve Jobs never claimed to have 'invented the Macintosh' ~ he was always a front-man for a team of people. (Maybe Jef just can't admit, he was a lousy team player?)
Jobs is one guy. Why didn't Wozniak see the greater merits of Raskin and fight for his pimacy of place? Why didn't the rest of Silicon Valley (all these visionaries) compete to put Jef Raskin's better world into reality?
Someone DESCRIBING a computer, whether in advance with prescience ~ or afterwards with hindsight ~ has not "invented" anything!