Jef Raskin

Computer pioneer Jef Raskin died Saturday. Raskin is regarded as the father of Apple Computer’s Macintosh. He named the revolutionary computer after his favorite eating apple (he changed the spelling for copyright reasons). In the 1970’s Raskin worked at the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) where a mouse driven Graphic User Interface (GUI) was first developed. Microsoft’s “Windows Operating System” is the most common example of a Graphic User Interface. Before the development of GUI, computer interfaces were text based and required users to enter long complex lines of text commands. I saw a movie a number of years ago titled “Pirates of the Silicon Valley”. It was about the computer pioneers that developed DOS and the GUI operating systems. The movie showed a computer developer demonstrating PARC’s first GUI system to a Xerox executive. In hindsight his comment was rather amusing…he said there was no way the public would use an operating system which was controlled by something called a “mouse” that had to be held in the palm of your hand. Talk about a blunder! It is often suggested that Apple used the ideas developed at PARC to launch its revolutionary Mac and that Microsoft Windows is based on Raskin’s “click and drop” idea. I recently read an article by Bob Moriarty in “MacCPU” which states that Raskin had conceived the idea of a Graphic User Interface long before working at Xerox. Moriarty claims that in 1967 Raskin wrote his Phd thesis on the concept of using graphics to command computers. Moriarty says that many of the ideas that came out of PARC were Raskins to begin with. In 1976 Raskin wrote the basic manual for the Apple II and joined the company in 1978. Raskin was employee #31 at Apple. Despite strong opposition from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, the Macintosh project as approved for development. Raskin convinced his peers at Apple that a computer that was affordable and easy to use would catch on with the public. His suggested that the Mac sell for between $500-$1,000 and be controlled by a GUI. This figure ballooned to close to $5,000 when Jobs took control of the project from Raskin. Raskin left Apple before the Mac was fully developed because of Jobs’ interference. His contribution to the computer world is huge. There is no question the computers we know today would have been far different without him.