“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.”
In TFA, Jef Raskin claims that the story about the mouse is not entirely correct:
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.
History is written by the victors. In this case it’s completely fine, as Raskin’s “corrections” don’t really amount to much, and certainly would have led to a path where Macintosh was just another abandoned experiment like the Apple III.
Perhaps in this alternate universe, a substantially reworked “Lisa II” might have been Apple’s long-lived computing platform.
The corrections may not amount to much, but there is no reason to believe that his version would be a failed experiment like the Apple III or the Lisa would have taken it's place.
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.
Lisa 2 was cheaper than many later Macs, but the Mac folks seemed to have no interest in converging the software platforms or in integrating Lisa features like memory protection. The result was that Lisa died as the Macintosh XL (ex-Lisa), with a Mac compatibility environment (MacWorks, which looked terrible with the stock Lisa rectangular pixels but better with a "Screen Kit" square pixel upgrade) as a consolation prize, while Mac users had to wait until Mac OS X for memory protection. Ultimately the Lisa hardware was able to run 68K versions of Mac OS through 7.6.1 in 1997.
Assuming the Mac folks had no interest in converging the platform in favour of the Lisa is somewhat unfair. While it sounds like some code was shared between the two platforms, the Lisa's operating system was quite different. It would have been difficult to make Lisa software operate under the Macintosh System Software. To my knowledge, there was virtually no software for the Lisa anyhow. Breaking software compatibility on the Macintosh to get the benefits of Lisa would have been a terrible business decision.
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.
Apple wasn't able to leverage or combine work on (Lisa, Lisa Smalltalk, Lisa Xenix, Mac OS, A/UX, etc.) and kept trying to reinvent many things from scratch (Pink/Taligent, Newton, Copland/NuKernel, etc.), a series of efforts that ultimately failed (though Newton shipped several products before being killed. As you note, protected memory was deferred to multiple failed Mac OS successor projects that went nowhere. Ultimately Apple gave up, acquired Steve Jobs and NeXT, and eventually successfully migrated the Mac platform to an OS with memory protection.
Since then however Apple's OS and hardware strategy has been much more coherent, with macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS etc. sharing code, and with shared SoC technology as well. Ironically this is similar to Microsoft's "Windows everywhere" strategy.
> certainly would have led to a path where Macintosh was just another abandoned experiment like the Apple III.
This seems really extreme. You're saying a trackpad would have made the whole thing a failure?
Part of this was due to Steve Jobs insisting on no arrow keys on the O.G. Mac's keyboard so as to force usage of the mouse.
That was my exact thought when I read the submission’s title. Thank you for finding and posting the article.
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.
Jef did go on to create a computer along the lines of his original vision after leaving Apple.
> 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.
After seeing a video of the Canon Cat in action, I thought “so, this is a lot like Emacs”.
It is, kind of. The Canon Cat is a good text editor. That's about all it does.
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.
> The Canon Cat is a good text editor. That's about all it does.
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.
It looked like a mere word processor, but—much like Emacs, especially org-mode—the Canon Cat was actually contextually aware of what the text meant, and allowed other operations to be performed on it as appropriate. For example, if you start typing numbers into tables, spreadsheet-like functionality became available, including the ability to perform mathematical operations over those numbers and have cells dynamically updated with the new values. Raskin called it a "work processor".
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.
The date in the title should be 2005, not 2013.
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.”
Raskin also died a month later at 26. Februar 2005 (cancer).
Visionary, yes.
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.
This concept of a story has been on HN so many times. It always starts with this technically correct but actually misleading headline fragment. Misleading clickbait works, even here. Every time.
In addition to his book, I am constantly linking to "Intuitive Equals Familiar:"
A short must-read for people designing (via prompt or any other tool) user experiences. It is timeless (so far!)
Jobs did the right thing, which was to make an affordable Lisa for home computing. The simplicity of the mouse was essential. It's sounds like Jef had other ideas.
I got to meet Jef Raskin in the early 2000s when he gave a talk in Sweden.
He was a fun person to chat with, lots of great ideas and the drive to work out the details.
I think that a Jef Raskins Mac would have been a commercial disaster. It would be a nice computer designed for a client: Jef Raskins.
He may be the man who started the Macintosh project, but Steve Jobs saved the Mac from him.
Fav quote:
"I have made changes in the world that are beyond what most people thought was possible, and I hope that my judgment continues to be good as to what is possible to change and what is not."
That interviewer really seemed to be ignorant of the facts as Jeff knows them and asked questions that kept annoying him.
Left the strong impression that Jeff thought him an idiot and his questions leave the reader feeling Jeff might be right.
It might have been an emailed list of questions, rather than a real-time conversation.
It was pretty obviously a one-way street; likely emailed.
Yeah that's a really stiff interview to publish, it reads like the interviewer pulled up to him while he was eating lunch and peppered him with questions.
Sometimes these interviews are done via a single email filled with questions and are not performed in-person, so the answer of a question isn't always carried forward into future questions, which can seem awkward from afar.
It's not a great interview and it's sad that Raskin passed a month later.
> 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.
> I would say that in another decade, at least some of what I’m working on will be taken for granted by millions of computer users.
It’s been over a decade since the interview. Anyone familiar with anything Raskin was working then that is ubiquitous now?
His research work was pretty foundational. Highly recommend his book! It’s timeless, especially since he did his explorations in a time before users were already “poisoned” by existing concepts and expectations - which is also a topic in his book.
The interview is from 2005. Jef passed away a month later.
Jef was a huge proponent of incremental search. That hasn't become mainstream-ubiquitous, but it is certainly code-editor-ubiquitous. Jef being an extremist, he wanted incremental search as the only mechanism for moving the cursor.
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."
https://folklore.org/The_Father_of_The_Macintosh.html:
“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.”
In TFA, Jef Raskin claims that the story about the mouse is not entirely correct:
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.
History is written by the victors. In this case it’s completely fine, as Raskin’s “corrections” don’t really amount to much, and certainly would have led to a path where Macintosh was just another abandoned experiment like the Apple III.
Perhaps in this alternate universe, a substantially reworked “Lisa II” might have been Apple’s long-lived computing platform.
The corrections may not amount to much, but there is no reason to believe that his version would be a failed experiment like the Apple III or the Lisa would have taken it's place.
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.
Lisa 2 was cheaper than many later Macs, but the Mac folks seemed to have no interest in converging the software platforms or in integrating Lisa features like memory protection. The result was that Lisa died as the Macintosh XL (ex-Lisa), with a Mac compatibility environment (MacWorks, which looked terrible with the stock Lisa rectangular pixels but better with a "Screen Kit" square pixel upgrade) as a consolation prize, while Mac users had to wait until Mac OS X for memory protection. Ultimately the Lisa hardware was able to run 68K versions of Mac OS through 7.6.1 in 1997.
Assuming the Mac folks had no interest in converging the platform in favour of the Lisa is somewhat unfair. While it sounds like some code was shared between the two platforms, the Lisa's operating system was quite different. It would have been difficult to make Lisa software operate under the Macintosh System Software. To my knowledge, there was virtually no software for the Lisa anyhow. Breaking software compatibility on the Macintosh to get the benefits of Lisa would have been a terrible business decision.
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.
Apple wasn't able to leverage or combine work on (Lisa, Lisa Smalltalk, Lisa Xenix, Mac OS, A/UX, etc.) and kept trying to reinvent many things from scratch (Pink/Taligent, Newton, Copland/NuKernel, etc.), a series of efforts that ultimately failed (though Newton shipped several products before being killed. As you note, protected memory was deferred to multiple failed Mac OS successor projects that went nowhere. Ultimately Apple gave up, acquired Steve Jobs and NeXT, and eventually successfully migrated the Mac platform to an OS with memory protection.
Since then however Apple's OS and hardware strategy has been much more coherent, with macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS etc. sharing code, and with shared SoC technology as well. Ironically this is similar to Microsoft's "Windows everywhere" strategy.
> certainly would have led to a path where Macintosh was just another abandoned experiment like the Apple III.
This seems really extreme. You're saying a trackpad would have made the whole thing a failure?
Part of this was due to Steve Jobs insisting on no arrow keys on the O.G. Mac's keyboard so as to force usage of the mouse.
That was my exact thought when I read the submission’s title. Thank you for finding and posting the article.
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.
Jef did go on to create a computer along the lines of his original vision after leaving Apple.
> 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.
If you want to get some flavor of what editing on the Canon Cat may have felt like, especially the LEAP keys, try Jasper and/or bitters.
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...)
https://sr.ht/~m15o/bitters/
Furthermore, Internet Archive hosts a runnable Canon Cat Emulation. I believe this means it is available in MAME as well.
https://archive.org/details/canoncat
After seeing a video of the Canon Cat in action, I thought “so, this is a lot like Emacs”.
It is, kind of. The Canon Cat is a good text editor. That's about all it does.
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.
> The Canon Cat is a good text editor. That's about all it does.
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.
It looked like a mere word processor, but—much like Emacs, especially org-mode—the Canon Cat was actually contextually aware of what the text meant, and allowed other operations to be performed on it as appropriate. For example, if you start typing numbers into tables, spreadsheet-like functionality became available, including the ability to perform mathematical operations over those numbers and have cells dynamically updated with the new values. Raskin called it a "work processor".
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.
The date in the title should be 2005, not 2013.
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.”
Raskin also died a month later at 26. Februar 2005 (cancer).
Visionary, yes.
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.
This concept of a story has been on HN so many times. It always starts with this technically correct but actually misleading headline fragment. Misleading clickbait works, even here. Every time.
In addition to his book, I am constantly linking to "Intuitive Equals Familiar:"
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!)
Jobs did the right thing, which was to make an affordable Lisa for home computing. The simplicity of the mouse was essential. It's sounds like Jef had other ideas.
I got to meet Jef Raskin in the early 2000s when he gave a talk in Sweden.
He was a fun person to chat with, lots of great ideas and the drive to work out the details.
I think that a Jef Raskins Mac would have been a commercial disaster. It would be a nice computer designed for a client: Jef Raskins.
He may be the man who started the Macintosh project, but Steve Jobs saved the Mac from him.
Fav quote: "I have made changes in the world that are beyond what most people thought was possible, and I hope that my judgment continues to be good as to what is possible to change and what is not."
See also Jef's excellent book,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface
That interviewer really seemed to be ignorant of the facts as Jeff knows them and asked questions that kept annoying him.
Left the strong impression that Jeff thought him an idiot and his questions leave the reader feeling Jeff might be right.
It might have been an emailed list of questions, rather than a real-time conversation.
It was pretty obviously a one-way street; likely emailed.
Yeah that's a really stiff interview to publish, it reads like the interviewer pulled up to him while he was eating lunch and peppered him with questions.
Sometimes these interviews are done via a single email filled with questions and are not performed in-person, so the answer of a question isn't always carried forward into future questions, which can seem awkward from afar.
It's not a great interview and it's sad that Raskin passed a month later.
> 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.
> I would say that in another decade, at least some of what I’m working on will be taken for granted by millions of computer users.
It’s been over a decade since the interview. Anyone familiar with anything Raskin was working then that is ubiquitous now?
His research work was pretty foundational. Highly recommend his book! It’s timeless, especially since he did his explorations in a time before users were already “poisoned” by existing concepts and expectations - which is also a topic in his book.
The interview is from 2005. Jef passed away a month later.
Jef was a huge proponent of incremental search. That hasn't become mainstream-ubiquitous, but it is certainly code-editor-ubiquitous. Jef being an extremist, he wanted incremental search as the only mechanism for moving the cursor.
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."