Jef Raskin, Mac pioneer, dies at 61.
Jef Raskin, the human-computer interface expert largely credited with beginning the Macintosh project for Apple Computer, died Saturday at age 61.
Raskin, the author of The Humane Interface, died of cancer, according to a man who answered the telephone Sunday at Raskin’s Pacifica, Calif., home.
Raskin, who named the Macintosh after his favorite fruit, joined Apple in January 1978 as employee No. 31. The Macintosh was launched in 1984, but Raskin left Apple in 1982 amid a well-documented dispute with Steve Jobs.
Reskin was an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, and a visiting scholar at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1970s when he first visited Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). (Apple is often accused of copying Xerox’s graphical user interface–GUI–into the Macintosh operating system).
Check out this demo of zoomable interfaces. We see some of this with F9 and company.
We still have so much to do wrt human-computer interfaces. Don’t you feel like a primate who can only poke and prod at things?
RIP.
