Wired News: The Macintosh’s Twisted Truth:
“…The true father of the Macintosh is Jef Raskin, a professor turned computer consultant who was hired by Apple in 1978 to write computer manuals…”

Well, while Wired is on its 20th-anniversary-of-Macintosh shtick, this has prompted me to blog my own take on the matter.

Jef was a very strong influence on me in my early research career: I had the good luck/fortune to live in his house in Solana beach, California, in the early 70’s, while I was a graduate student at the University of California at San Diego. Jef’s house was frequently vacant during that period because he was mostly up in the Bay area on sabbatical from his normal life as a Professor of Music (at least that’s what I knew him as) at UCSD, checking things out and (like others of that era) being completely blown away by Alan Kay and Kay’s Learning Research Group at Xerox PARC. Jef knew that these LRG ideas had to be brought to the masses, and he had some good ideas about how to achieve this. One of Jef’s early achievements among the Apple-II group in his early days at Apple was requiring everyone in his group to use an Apple-II (programming in UCSD-Pascal, which he had brought up with him from Ken Bowles’ group at UC San Diego). This in effect required the team to ‘live within the environment’ as a forcing function to help boostrap the environment into a better state – something unheard of at the time (because such teams would typically have wanted to work on more powerful timesharing systems and minicomputers of the day). I don’t know anything about the Raskin/Jobs dynamics, so I can’t add to the folklore on this front, but I do know that when I visited Jef at Apple in the late 70’s he had that gleam in his eye and said he was going to bring PARC-like tools to the masses, only better!

Jef was in and out of that Solana beach house all the time, even during his sabbatical, and he was doing wonderfully zany things. He used to drive us to restaurants in a huge truck he had, which had a specially-dampened engine compartment so that his musician’s hearing would not be adversely damaged by the roar. In the back of the truck he used to carry what I remember as a DG Nova 1200 or PDP-9 minicomputer (remember, we’re talking 1973/4), and on occasion would wheel it into a restaurant, complete with one of those DEC VT-52-style consoles, and write a small BASIC program to compute the bill and freak out the staff.

Jef had designed a compact computer language called FLOW, for teaching programming to novices, particularly Arts and Humanities students at UCSD. It was my first exposure to the concept of a ’syntax-directed editing’ environment, but this was something Jef had essentially invented and certainly taken to the limits: “You cannot make a syntax error in FLOW,” Jef would say proudly, and then proceed to close his eyes, flail away blindly at the keyboard, and compose a syntactically-perfect program– the editor/interpreter itself dynamically disabled and enabled everything on the keyboard according to the context, so if you pressed a meaningless key, nothing would happen, and ONLY syntactically-correct programs could be written. Nice! This in turn proved to be a profound inspiration for my own work on teaching programming to novices: why should they suffer with idiotic mistakes that the computer itself could have preempted? Jef was uncompromising in his belief that computers ought to be great symbolic engines for the masses, and that designers and engineers should pull out all the stops to make life more pleasant for computer users.

I recall that the living room of Jef’s house in Solana beach was unusable, because it was full of fantastic instruments… pianos, organs, harpsichords, all in pristine condition– seven or eight of ‘em. Once in a while he would appear and entertain us with some virtuoso performance. I can’t remember exactly what he played, but I can most emphatically remember the style and attitude of his playing: an uncanny humour was evident in the playing, itself a remarkable achievement, because he would not clown around verbally while playing (like, say, Victor Borge), but rather express his humour via the phrasing and composition itself, something I had not experienced before.

Anyway, I’ll stop here… I didn’t want this to read like some kind of obituary! Rather, that Wired article set off a few alarm bells because it painted a picture that was too simplistic, and I thought ought to be fleshed out with a few personal reminiscences. I hope Jef won’t mind my posting these… in any event the comments are deservedly flattering, so they shouldn’t be objectionable. I’m grateful to have known Jef back then, and grateful for the way in which he helped nudge my interests in the direction they’ve taken. He’s into tons of interesting stuff, as always… you can Google him to find out more, or check Jef’s website!

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