![]() "Jef had an idea of a much more focused machine in mind, not really a general-purpose computer which the Mac became," Mr. Raskin had differing visions of what the Macintosh should be. Raskin's greatest legacies was the Macintosh project, which was taken over by Mr. Raskin is often referred to as the "father of the Macintosh." Among Mr. "One of the things that Raskin taught me early was that the person was important and the computer wasn't," Mr. Raskin pioneered the use of the word "font" to refer to digital typefaces, and was among the creators of the "click and drag" method of manipulating icons on a computer screen, according to a statement released by his family. Raskin joined Apple in 1978 as the director of publications and wrote the manual for the Apple II. Raskin entered a graduate music program at the University of California at San Diego, but stopped to teach art, photography and computer science there, working as an assistant professor from 1970 until 1974.Īfter founding a software consulting company, Mr. His first computer program, a music program, was part of his master's thesis. He earned a master's degree in computer science at Pennsylvania State University in 1967. Raskin studied mathematics and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, graduating in 1965. He was an accomplished musician, composer, conductor and painter, as well as a mathematician, book author and model airplane designer.īorn in New York City, Mr. "He really spent his life urging a degree of simplicity where computers would be not only easy to use but delightful," said Steven Levy, a technology writer and the author of "Insanely Great," a history of the Macintosh computer.īy almost any measure, Mr. But he is credited with providing the vision for the Macintosh, the highly accessible and affordable computer that hit stores in 1984. Raskin left Apple in 1982 after his relationship with Steve Jobs, the company's co-founder, soured. He wanted to make them more usable and friendly to people who weren't geeks." "You had to be some kind of geek to even want to use a computer. Raskin recruited to work at Apple in 1978. "At that time, computers were for nerds," said Bill Atkinson, a software designer who Mr. Raskin advocated forcefully for the company to develop a computer that was easy for people to use, and he headed the Macintosh project starting in 1979. As the 31st employee at Apple Computer, Mr. Raskin, who named the Macintosh after his favorite apple but altered the spelling for copyright reasons, played a significant role in transforming computers into friendlier machines, helping to catapult them into the commercial sphere. The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Linda Blum. The first is that Raskin’s sarcastic version of what a Macintosh should include isn’t worlds away from Jobs’ vision.Jef Raskin, a computer technology pioneer who started the team that created the Macintosh computer, died Saturday at his home in Pacifica, Calif., at age 61. These factors must all be juggled simultaneously.” Why the clash over the Macintosh price mattersĪ few things about the clash between Jobs and Raskin fascinate me. We must start both with a price goal, and a set of abilities, and keep an eye on today’s and the immediate future’s technology. It can also synthesize music, even simulate Caruso singing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, with various reverberation.Ĭonclusion: starting with the abilities is nonsense. Let’s include speech synthesis and recognition, with a vocabulary of 34,000 words. Besides an unexcelled collection of application programs, the software includes BASIC, Pascal, LISP, FORTRAN, APL, PL\1, COBOL, and an emulator for every processor since the IBM 650. When you buy the computer, you get a free unlimited access to the ARPAnet, the various timesharing services, and other informational, computer accessible databases. There is about 200K bytes of main storage besides screen memory and a miniature, pocketable, storage element that holds a megabyte and costs $.50, in unit quantity. ![]() The printer should weigh only a fraction of a pound, and never need a ribbon or mechanical adjustment. It is accompanied by a 96 character by 66 line display that has almost no depth, and a laser-quality printer that also doesn’t weigh much, and takes ordinary paper and produces text at one page per second (not so fast that you can’t catch them as they come out.) The printer can also produce any graphics the screen can show (with at least 1000 by 1200 points of resolution). “ a small, lightweight computer with an excellent, typewriter style keyboard. Jef Raskin rips Steve Jobs on Mac pricingĪ bristling Raskin responded with a sarcastic memo to Jobs, replicated in the excellent book Apple Confidential 2.0:
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