Games - Jef Raskin

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Jef Raskin (March 9, 1943–February 26, 2005) was an American human-computer interface expert best-known for starting the Macintosh project for Apple Computer in the late 1970s.

Early years and education

Raskin was born in New York City. He received degrees in mathematics (B.S. 1964) and philosophy (B.A. 1965) at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He earned a master's degree in computer science at Pennsylvania State University in 1967. His first computer program, a music program, was part of his master's thesis.

Raskin later enrolled in a graduate music program at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), but stopped to teach art, photography and computer science there, working as an assistant professor from 1970 until 1974. He occasionally wrote for computer publications, such as Dr. Dobb's.

Career at Apple

Raskin first met Apple Computer's Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak following the debut of their Apple II personal computer at the First West Coast Computer Faire. Steve Jobs hired his firm, Bannister and Crun, to write the Apple II BASIC Programming Manual. In January 1978 Raskin joined Apple as manager of Publications, the company's 31st employee. For some time he continued as director of Publications and New Product Review, and also worked on packaging and other issues.

From his responsibility for documentation and testing, Raskin had great influence on early engineering projects. Because the Apple II only displayed uppercase characters on a 40-column screen, his department used Intel-based machines running CP/M to write documentation; this spurred the development of an 80-column display card for the Apple II. His experiences testing Applesoft BASIC inspired him to design a competing product, called Notzo BASIC, which was never implemented. When Steve Wozniak developed the first disk drives for the Apple II, Raskin went back to his contacts at UCSD and encouraged them to port the UCSD P-System operating system to it, which Apple later licensed and shipped as Apple Pascal. Through this time he continually wrote memos about how the personal computer could become a true consumer appliance (including an essay titled "Computers by the Millions") and how even the Apple II was too complex for nontechnical people. While the Apple III was under development, Raskin was lobbying for Apple to create a radically different kind of computer that was designed from the start to be easy to use.

He later hired his former student Bill Atkinson from UCSD to work at Apple, and began the Macintosh project in 1979. The machine he envisioned was much different than the Macintosh that was eventually released, and had much more in common with PDA's than modern GUI-based machines. The machine was similar in power to the Apple II and included a small 9-inch black-and-white character display built into a small case with a floppy disk. A number of basic applications were built into the machine, selectable by pressing function keys. The machine also included logic that would understand user intentions and switch programs on the fly. For instance, if the user simply started typing it would switch into editor mode, and if they typed numbers it would switch to calculator mode. In many cases these switches would be largely invisible to the user.

In 1981 Steve Jobs, who had supported the Macintosh project but was more deeply involved in shaping the direction for the Apple Lisa, was asked to stop interfering in the Lisa project. He directed his attention to Raskin's Macintosh project, intending to marry the Xerox PARC-inspired GUI-based Lisa design to Raskin's appliance computing, "computers-by-the-millions" concept. Raskin takes credit for introducing Jobs and other Apple employees to the PARC concepts, but it appears this is not really the case. Raskin also claims to have had continued direct input into the eventual Mac design, including the decision to use a one-button mouse as part of the Apple interface, a departure from the Xerox PARC standard of a three-button mouse. Others, including Larry Tesler, acknowledge his advocacy for a one-button mouse but say that it was a decision reached simultaneously by others at Apple who had a stronger say on the issue. Raskin later stated that were he to redesign the mouse it would have three clearly labelled buttons - two buttons on top marked "Select" and "Activate," and a "Grab" button on the side that could be used by squeezing the mouse.

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